2025-11-15 07:00:00
Casey Newton: The Bluesky Exodus, One Year Later
Bluesky's ingenuity in reimagining feeds and moderation tools has been a boon to social networks, which have happily adopted some of its best ideas. (You can now find "starter packs" on both Threads and Mastodon.) Ultimately, though, it has the same shape and fundamental dynamics as a place that even its most active users called "the Hellsite."
Bluesky has had some really good ideas, and it has been cool to see them roll out to different platforms.
That said, I actually find Bluesky to be the text-based social network I browse the least these days. Well, obviously, besides X. Mastodon is where I go to see what the cool nerds are talking about, and Threads, despite my skepticism just a few months ago, has turned into a pretty good replacement for what Twitter used to be for me. If I hear rumblings that something notable just happened, there's a good chance I can open Threads and find out exactly what's going on because people are chatting about it. Not to make every post here about politics, but let's just say in the past 10 months, there have been quite a few instances where something notable has happened and I want to get caught up quick.
Another thing I'll mention here is that while Bluesky definitely got the headlines a year ago when they were getting numerous enormous spikes in users, it definitely seems like a lot of those users have fallen off. And while Mastodon never quite got that level of viral adoption, it does seem to be chugging along relatively healthily. At this point, I don't think Mastodon is ever going to be super mainstream, but I also don't think it needs to be.
2025-11-15 06:00:32
The major game studios release one game every five to ten years at this point, when they used to release absolute classics every one or two years. I do not like this trend.
2025-11-15 05:30:00
John Ganz writing in 2023: The Preppie in Decline
His father, Don Black, was a Klan wizard and the founder of the website Stormfront. Here’s what he told me: “From the perspective of my family, he’s making the same points they’ve been trying to make their entire lives, but much better; he’s found a wider audience, and the ideal method of expression for many of the same ideas. My father’s a little baffled still that it’s Tucker Carlson, someone who he always never liked because he saw him as a shill for the Bush administration and the Iraq war, that’s bringing white nationalist ideas to the Fox audience.”
This article is from two years ago, but I really want people to understand what's going on in the absolute most mainstream conservative discourse. I'm writing this, of course, less than a week after the same Tucker Carlson hosted an out white nationalist on his very influential podcast where they discussed how the Jews are the reason for many problems. No, not in coded words, literally saying this. You also have the likes of Megyn Kelly trying to shift the narrative on Jeffrey Epstein that he wasn't really a pedophile because he liked 15-year-old girls, not like eight-year-olds or anything. This shift from Kristal, of course, happens immediately after documentation comes out showing there was quite the relationship between Dear Leader and Epstein.
2025-11-15 05:17:17
Evan Sandhu on the 1Password blog: A Simpler, Faster Way to Unlock 1Password
The new unlock with device setting lets 1Password open right alongside your Mac or PC. It unlocks as soon as you pass your device's own lock screen using a secure authentication method, whether that's Face ID, Touch ID, a PIN, or a password.
Honestly, I'm really looking forward to this. I appreciate that there may be security reasons why some people wouldn't want to tie their Mac authentication to 1Password, but for me, this will be great.
2025-11-12 11:38:54
John Voorhees writing for MacStories: Apple and ISSEY MIYAKE Introduce a Limited-Edition iPhone Pocket
The iPhone Pocket will be available starting Friday, November 14, for $149.95 for the short strap version and $229.95 for the long strap version from Apple’s online store and ten retail stores worldwide
The impression I’ve gotten on social media today is that I should be mad about this. I’m not going to sit here and tell you these are amazing deals and I’m going to get one, in fact I wouldn’t get one even if they were $10. I’ll admit it seems a strange product, though.
2025-11-12 01:45:00
Juli Clover writing for MacRumors, linking to a post on The Information: iPhone Air Sales Are So Bad That Apple's Delaying the Next-Generation Version
Apple initially planned to release a new iPhone Air in fall 2026, but now that's not going to happen.
Now that The Information is reporting on it as well, I'm guessing the numerous rumors of it's underperformance have been true. Taking a year off to make the Air less of a compromised device that only appeals to people who can afford to purposely spend more to get less is the right call, in my opinion.
I wrote a member's post recently about how I thought the iPhone Air is much different from the iPhone X, which proved to be a very successful phone and which was indeed the immediate future of the whole iPhone lineup. In short, the iPhone X was an upgrade in every single metric over the other iPhones at the time, it wasn't a compromise device that had a cool design. You paid more, but you got more, no asterisks.
It's not that I doubt a thin iPhone could be successful, I just don't think it's going to move the needle with normal people until it either feels like a straight upgrade over the normal iPhone or Apple can fill the gaps and just makes it the normal iPhone in the lineup.