Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I don’t know about y’all but I’ve taken the week between Christmas and New Year off. I do it every year and it’s a nice way to wrap up the year. I’m never sure what I’m going to do during my time off but I do hope to work on Stream a little bit and with any luck we’ll have the grandkids over at least one more time. They’re here now and we’re having a great time together.
More than 200 Substack authors asked the platform to explain why it’s “platforming and monetizing Nazis,” and now they have an answer straight from co-founder Hamish McKenzie
I follow a number of writers I really like on Substack and I have a terrible feeling they’ll all continue to use the Nazi loving platform because of the money they generate.
I will no longer be supporting any of those authors or linking to any of their work until they abandon the platform.
There are options. You could move to Buttondown, use WordPress, or roll your own like Ben Thompson did for Stratechery.
I know that last option is not for the faint of heart but Ben has managed a successful, paid, newsletter for over a decade.
WordPress is still a bit of work, but much easier than roll-your-own. You can pay WordPress to host your site.
Buttondown is not a VC backed venture — that supports Nazi’s — so it takes money to keep it going. Yes, Buttondown is a paid service.
I’d imagine there are other options. Look around and get away from Substack as quickly as humanly possible.
Figma and Adobe have reached a joint decision to end our pending acquisition. It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.
Time certainly does fly! I had no idea it had been 18-months since the proposed acquisition began.
I know there were equal parts excitement and dread around the deal but know all folks need to worry about is Figma surviving as a company.
Will Adobe blow the dust off of XD and get back to work or has that season passed? I was on the XD beta and thought it was a really great piece of software. It was a shame to see it go.
If you want an overview of how things are in Lahaina four months after the fire, check out Jesse Wald’s video. TL;DR: The EPA just completed the hazardous materials removal project and now the main debris removal will start and take about a year.
Devastating. That’s the only word I can use to describe the Lahaina fire. As Bill notes it’s going to take years for things to get back to “normal.” As if normal can ever really return to these poor people. 💔
Chance Miller and Ben Lovejoy • 9to5Mac
The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.
This is interesting news. It makes me wonder how much Apple will eventually pay to make the problem go away or will they buy the company?
Andrew Hutchinson • Social Media Today
As Threads continues to gain momentum, especially among journalists, a next key step will be the development of an API, which will then enable direct publishing to Threads, as well as scheduling, third-party analytics, and more.
I can kind of see why they’re creating this input only API. They want to support news organizations and the like who schedule posts or have them setup as a part of their publishing workflow.
But Threads could do it by setting up a Weblogs Ping server and accept RSS feeds!
Weblogs ping is a way to tell a server ”Hey, I have an update” and the server goes out and collects your RSS feed. This would be really great for batch updates. Threads could even define their own namespace extension to RSS if they need additional data. Problem solved!
David McCabe and Nico Grant • The New York Times
Google said on Monday that it would allow developers on its Play app store to offer direct payment options to users and would pay $700 million to settle an antitrust suit brought by state attorneys general, in the company’s latest move to navigate increased regulatory scrutiny of its power.
It was kind of strange to see Google lose and Apple win their respective cases. Google chose a jury trial which seems to have lead to their loss.
No matter. It now makes Apple the only company that requires using their store and payment system. Will this help a Government case if they ever push on Apple to allow third party stores and payment systems?
Laine Campbell • Facebook Engineering
While the app’s production launch had been under consideration for some time, the business finally made the decision and informed the infrastructure teams to prepare for its launch with only two days’ advance notice. The decision was made with full confidence that Meta’s infrastructure teams can deliver based on their past track record and the maturity of the infrastructure. Despite the daunting challenges with minimal lead time, the infrastructure teams supported the app’s rapid growth exceptionally well.
This is an incredible engineering feat. I’m not a fan of Facebook but they do have amazing engineers. If you’re into what it takes to power millions of users the world over go read the piece. It’s really good.
Ukraine’s military intelligence didn’t reveal what forces fighting on Ukraine’s side were responsible for the attack, hinting that it could have been one of the Russian battalions employed by Kyiv.
It’s heartwarming to see Russians push back against Putin. We 100% need to continue our support of Ukraine. Putin and his authoritarian regime cannot be allowed to take another inch of Ukrainian soil. If Ukraine falls, who’s next?
Since RSS is an open web thing that brings you stuff people write, and ActivityPub is also an open web thing that brings you stuff people write, it’s an obvious good idea to do both in the same app. Totally.
I thought about supporting ActivityPub — Mastodon in particular — as a first class citizen in Stream but the truth of the matter is it’s already a first class citizen because Mastodon supports RSS natively and it’s really good! Case closed.
