Linked List: August 21, 2026

Friday, 21 August 2026

The Fourth Horseman of the File-Format-Hegemony Apocalypse ★

Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.

Walmart Finally Caves, Will Soon Support Apple Pay ★

Walmart:

When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.

We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

When I think about convenience, I think about CurrentC, scanning stupid-ass QR codes, and waiting 12 years to adopt Apple Pay.

Bluesky’s Active User Base Is Shrinking, and Remains Tiny Compared to Threads and Twitter/X ★

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch last week:

Decentralized social network Bluesky was one of the bigger beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X in November 2024, following the U.S. elections. But now, nearly two years later, the social network and would-be X competitor is struggling to hold on to its momentum.

According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky’s mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million.

As always, take all third-party analytics and usage data about app usage with an enormous grain of salt. Third-party data companies can only estimate this data, they can’t know it. It’s like comparing polling data to election results.

But I think it’s obviously true that Threads and Twitter/X both have hundreds of millions of active users, and Bluesky has like maybe 10 million. Even if Bluesky has three times more actual users than Similarweb’s data suggests, that would still suggest that Bluesky’s user base is an entire order of magnitude smaller than Threads or Twitter/X. And Mastodon is so small that no one even mentions it anymore in these comparisons. Mastodon and the whole ActivityPub world make Bluesky look large and culturally relevant.

Small is not necessarily bad. My favorite of these networks, personally, is Mastodon. I like my community there because it’s small and generally free of both drama and nonsense. But small precludes mainstream cultural relevance.

Bluesky Is Full of Anti-AI Zealots ★

Mike Masnick, in a thread on Bluesky:

Multiple people I know have told me that they love the idea of Bluesky, and want it to succeed, but have abandoned it for X because they use agentic tools in their work and find them incredibly useful, and feel that any mention of their usage here leads to hate and ridicule.

I wouldn’t bring this up if it was just one person, but it was multiple people since the beginning of August who mentioned in passing something to the effect of either “I’d spend more time on Bluesky if people weren’t so anti-AI” or “As much as I hate to be there all the useful AI talk is on X.” [...]

I’m not telling anyone what to do or what tech to use or what to like or not like. I’m just relaying that the reputation this place now has is one that a large segment of the population who are NOT fascists, saying they don’t feel comfortable here because a main area of their interest is considered worthy of being mocked and attacked. And even as I’ve explained that I’ve been able to have positive conversations about productive AI usage here with many of you, the reputation of the community here as insisting their own lived experience can’t possibly be real has driven them away.

It’s not just “the reputation”. That really is the culture of Bluesky. I’ve obviously written more about AI this month than usual — in particular, my two long pieces regarding watermarking LLM-generated text through word-choice diddling. I don’t really write much about AI generally.

Broadly, I’m making two arguments against text watermarking. First, that the embedding of a detectable signal (even if subtle) must necessarily degrade the quality of the generated prose (even if only slightly), and that this is an unacceptable trade-off for a feature that has no benefit to the user and in fact can only be used against the user. Second, that even if I’m wrong about the first part, and a clever enough watermarking scheme can embed a detectable signature without any degradation of prose quality, this is a bad idea and should be rejected.

Reaction to my takes on text watermarking have largely been about these two arguments. Some people agree with me that what watermarking proponents are claiming is not possible — the text quality must degrade. Others agree that while it must have an effect on text quality, it in fact is so subtle that it truly does not matter and even a careful reader will not notice an overall degradation. Others disagree, tell me I don’t understand the cleverness of the systems, and are convinced that somehow this watermarking truly embeds a detectable signal in prose without any degradation of text quality whatsoever. There’s a range of disagreement, but it’s all reasonable. Likewise on the broader question of whether it’s a good idea or not to even try to do this.

The reaction on Bluesky to my recent work is like nothing else. It’s largely in the vein that watermarking can’t possibly make AI-generated text worse because it’s already random gibberish, and that the only explanation for my being opposed to this is that I must be using AI to produce my own writing and I’m upset that my scheme will soon be detectable. Read the replies to this one; they speak for themselves.

I continue to think my friend Daniel Jalkut has espoused the one true take: “My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.” It is way less inflammatory to espouse an AI-skeptical stance on Twitter/X than it is to simply state that AI can be truly useful on Bluesky.

Anyway, Masnick, at the end of the day yesterday:

The people bitching about me turning off replies on my thread earlier today are doing an excellent job reinforcing why I was right to turn off replies.