2025-01-28 05:27:08
Along with ensuring you can follow a conversation with ease, one of the biggest things I wanted from Micro Social is the ability to be customisable. To be able to shape the way the timeline of posts can be consumed. To get exactly what you want at any point. Here’s the timeline on Micro Social.
With a range of filters available, you can limit and expand the posts you see depending on your mood. You can hide your own (or all) replies from appearing, keep Mentions in their own tab and even get rid of all the photo posts. With a few taps, you can take a nosey feed and quieten it down to a whimper.
I’ve also implemented muting and blocking of profiles, both on micro.blog and federated from elsewhere. There is also full keyword filtering that straightforward to use, so you will only see what you want to.
Why would you want to hide photo posts, you might wonder, it’s a big part of micro.blog — well you can toggle on your own Instagram like feed of everyone’s photos instead. This unique experience mixes photos from your feed, discover and the photos collection into one place. With no infinite scroll to keep you hooked — one calm, happy place.
While we’re on photos, posts with multiple images won’t take up your whole timeline any more. They’ll be displayed in a nice carrousel for your enjoyment, and you can view them full screen with a tap. It doesn’t matter if you’re scrolling your feed, or viewing a threaded conversation, images look great but stay out of your way.
I feel as though I’ve moved so quickly with this app and I am getting to a really enjoyable place, so I’m getting more confident I may launch something soon. I have some more features planned to make this the only micro.blog app you need. There’s been some late nights, and I am sure there will be more to come, so stay tuned for more info.
If you feel like contributing to my work and maybe funding an App Store developer account feel free to buy me a coffee or two.
2025-01-23 22:21:12
Despite possibly picking the wrong time to work on micro.blog related things, I’m determined to push on a work in public to create something worthwhile. Anyway, my first target was threading, it’s one of my biggest frustrations on micro.blog and sometimes makes conversations challenging to follow, so getting this correct and intuitive is important to me.
When accessing a post that is a reply now, the post view displays the post you tapped on accented slightly. Directly above this is the post it is replying to (including a label), and if this is in a longer thread you will also see the ‘Thread Starter’ which is the original post that started it all.
Underneath this are any replies to the post you are viewing, and you can scroll down a little more to see all the replies to the Thread Starter. You can, of course, tap on any of the other posts to see where they fit in the chain and follow along the conversation more easily.
It’s still not perfect, but it shows where my ideas lie is and highlights the reason this app exists. To make all the social elements easier to use on micro.blog, and really focus on that goal. Leaving other apps to offer different features.
If you tap on a post that is a single post, this displays all the replies underneath it as expected. Or if there are not any replies, it will encourage you to leave one and ‘start the conversation’. There’s still some work to tackle ensuring replies go to the right places, but things are going the right way.
As with all of these posts, as I move forward, I am delighted with feedback, good or especially bad, that is focused on the UI and usability. It will help shape the development of the app going forward and also help me improve as a designer. You can reach out to me by leaving a reply, or tap reply via email below, and we can chat about anything you like. As long as it’s not can I have a beta!
2025-01-23 04:31:38
There’s a lot going on that I want to be away from at the minute. Couple this with my desire to push my skills forward and make something I’m working on a micro.blog app built in Swift, and its placeholder name is micro social.
If you’ve been on micro.blog or any of my connected services the last few days, I’m probably muted from all the test posts I’m doing, but it’s all from a good place. I’ve wanted to build something of my own for a while, and I’m glad I started this project. The app itself is very bare bones at the minute, but I’m building faster than I expected.
My aims are for it to be native, all built in swift UI and as fast as possible. There won’t be all the bells and whistles for posting long blog posts I’m afraid, although it will still be possible. I want it to be for those that want something more social from micro.blog — hence the name.
I’m placing my attention on good timeline updating, simple UI for threading replies and making it as easy to use as possible. There’s a long way to go yet, but I’ve been using it to read the timeline and post short posts today, and I’m happy with where it’s is and how fast it is the use.
Don’t expect betas or anything any time soon, you can see how basic it is from the screenshots. There’s also a million more complex tasks that I keep putting off and don’t even mention notifications! This post is more of holding myself accountable, so I don’t let it slide. So if you see this post and haven’t seen any updates on it in a while feel free to nag me along a little bit!
2025-01-03 20:17:31
After the last few years using exclusively Fuji cameras, bar a short test with a Ricoh GRiiix, I am sorry to say I’ve switched back to Sony. There are a few reasons for this, but this is in no way a justification or a reason why I think they suck, merely my thoughts on the subject as a few people have asked. This won’t be a very elegant post, just a few points I feel are worth raising.
“Why don’t you just manual focus like a real photographer?” I hear them shout back to my pathetic moaning. The truth is, when I got my first Fuji camera after selling all my Sony gear about 4 years ago, I thought the autofocus sucked. It didn’t. Granted, it wasn’t as good as I was used to with my Sony A7iii, but after a bit of experimentation I got used to its quirks and found it pretty reliable for the types of photography I wanted to do.
Since getting the XT5 I felt a decline in performance from the autofocus, particularly AFC, which affected my enjoyment. In street photography there can be fleeting moments and I missed quite a few of them because of poor or slow autofocus. Recent firmware updates have promised to fix this but have indeed made it worse! This came to a head around a month ago when camped out waiting for a shot I had lined up. After more than 45 minutes of waiting for subjects, the autofocus kept letting me down.
It was as they call it, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
There has also been a significant decline in build quality. My trusty XT3 felt like a masterpiece and was a delight to use. As was my X100V. Solid, reliable and nice to use. Whereas the XT5 had creaky doors covering the ports and seemed to be made for the scratchiest plastic they could find.
It never let me down in the short time I had it, but it didn’t fill me full of confidence, and I know others have had problems with cracking, whether sealing and other minor issues. Fujifilm seems more concerned with purposely restricting manufacturing than actually making good cameras.
There are things I will miss from Fuji Cameras, particularly how enjoyable they are to use with top dials for settings, but they lost the joy I had when first using them due to the above issues. I don’t make any money from my photography, and these frustrations got in my way of having a good time when out and about.
Sony cameras often feel too sterile and boring. Perfect for a pro workhorse but missing something special. However, the A7CR that I picked up, with a 50 mm prime, feels at least a little like a Leica and has brought me back at least some enjoyment.
2025-01-01 19:29:51
Kōdō Shimon writing about the rise in AI ‘Street Photography’
Street photography isn’t just about getting images. It’s about being present in the world, engaging with fellow humans, finding the courage to put yourself in uncomfortable situations.
I should preface my thoughts on this with the fact that I am not against LLMs’ use as an assistive tool. I do so daily and am a big fan of what they can do for my life and my productivity (yes, I just threw up a bit typing that word out).
What I really hate is the use of AI to create an end product that means absolutely nothing. I have been quite into this, creating supporting images for my blog posts with AI because I thought it was needed, but I quickly realised that it completely misses the point.
The whole point of looking at a photo is because it captures a point in time that happened. I won’t get into the whole “what is a photo?” debate here because photographers can manipulate it, play with colours, and enhance the effects present in the image. But it still happened. At some point, a sensor captured the photo and processed the image of a real-world event.
This is what evokes the emotions. The ability to see the image and reflect on it happening. Otherwise, what is the point? For street photography in particular, this is one of my passions, and creating it artificially defeats the whole purpose of the genre. When I take photos, I want to show the beauty and the art in everyday life. From the small details you miss when you don’t look deeper.
Other street photographers capture moments that may never be repeated. Events and people that are frozen in time as a reference point of things that happened. As pointed out in the post, the use of AI to recreate these types of photos represents
“the collapse of meaning in our rush to simulate experience rather than live it”. The end product is the only concern, producing an image instead of creating a photo. “emulation versus native execution” as Kōdō puts it.
When I take photos, I am engrossed in the world like no other experience can reproduce. It is very much like meditation, enabling me to think about nothing else than spotting beautiful details of everyday life that you may consider mundane. It is an experience, and I like to think that transfers through the resultant image.
Remove all of this out of the process, and it completely misses the point. You get nothing more than a throwaway arrangement of pixels that means absolutely nothing — but then again, forgettable media seems to be what the world revolves around now.
2025-01-01 18:15:39
Manuel Moreale writing Kindness in a transactional world
Kindness is the reason why I’m doing this. There’s no other reason. I don’t care about getting a reward. I care about showing people that in this stupid transactional world, we can still be kind to one another. We can still help someone, even if we’ll get nothing in return.
Manuel’s posts are some of my favourite to read online. Through provoking, and revolving around pushing to the web. So I may find references to his work all over my blog because of how similar they feel to my thoughts. Particularly when it comes to writing and publishing for free.
Getting paid for doing something you enjoy is every person’s dream, yet when I think about getting paid for writing online, I would dread it. I enjoy it much more when my motivation is just for the fun of it. To be kind and put out my thoughts, ideas, and solutions to problems into the world and hope they help someone in a similar position.
As I have written before, I see my place in this world as being for others. I always put myself last, and I am perfectly fine with doing so because the things I do are because I like being kind. I want my actions to show that in a world that seems to value return on investment and monitoring even part of your life, you don’t need to live like that.