Cloudflare started its life nearly 20 years ago, and I found out about it basically because I was running a blog—and obsessed with keeping it online.

ShortFormBlog was many things, but the most important was that it was barely held together technically because I did not know what I was doing back then. I learned so many things about content management from it, but I had to make a few mistakes first. First: I originally built my numbers and blurbs as custom fields, rather than using something flexible like Markdown. (I eventually figured out a system to optimize them using unordered lists and CSS. But that only happened because—I kid you not—AOL News wanted to publish some ShortFormBlog-style posts and I needed to figure out a way to make them portable.)

In the midst of all this, I stumbled on Project Honey Pot, the anti-spam initiative that led to Cloudflare, which they were working on at the time. I realized this was going to be a very useful tool. And as a result, I was such an early customer of Cloudflare that they sent me a T-shirt listing me as one of their first 1,000 customers.

So it would be a weirdly neat homecoming if I could figure out a way to make ShortFormBlog work with Cloudflare’s new content management tool EmDash. It exists to convince scores of people to move their old unstable, insecure WordPress blogs over to Astro.

From a cultural perspective, we have moved past WordPress technically in so many ways, but it sticks around in part because sites stick around, and they can be difficult to move or restructure. Site migrations are hard, and I’ve been through a few in my day. But I dread having to move the 16,000 posts on the original ShortFormBlog archive to somewhere else. (I actually tried, and it was just so much damn work that I had to set it aside.)

However, maintaining a WordPress site for something so old is just not a realistic option for most people. It’d be better if the final result was static and relied on minimal plugins.

EmDash is a path forward for that, utilizing the of-the-moment technical capabilities of Astro, a website framework that mixes the benefits of static site generators and React-style interactivity, and Cloudflare workers. However, it looks like WordPress in every public-facing way.

This has been pitched as a spiritual successor to WordPress, and one might wonder why Cloudflare would be interested in such an endeavor. To me, it’s very simple: Essentially, it could potentially help the company save costs by putting very complex sites on static ground. I’ve written in the past about how PHP remains a surprisingly good option for content management systems because it’s mature. But the flipside of that is that PHP is also quite slow, and comes with a ton of additional security risks that more modern systems have built for with a proactive posture, rather than a reactive one.

This move makes 100% sense, and not just because Cloudflare acquired Astro three months ago. Essentially, this could solve a problem for the company: By convincing old WordPress sites to move to EmDash, it lowers reliance on the company’s caching infrastructure to simply offer a good experience. That has benefits from both a security and a bandwidth perspective. So many of these sites should be static. But they aren’t, and that’s so much of the reason that CloudFlare exists. But when it has competitors like Vercel, which is essentially built for another generation of website, anything it can do to chip off some of the legacy is welcome.

No, this won’t work for every site out of the box. Part of the reason these Byzantine old WordPress sites stick around is because they have such strong reliance on old, barely functioning plugins that it’s literally impossible to disconnect them.

This is one exit ramp. But it is an exit ramp with some awkward elements. It is clear, looking at the code of this tool, that you’re essentially meant to use it with Claude Code to do your scaffolding and maybe even some of your plugin design. Given the world we live in, you may or may not love that. But on the other hand, I can see the other side of this—that many of the sites that would benefit from a move to EmDash are likely not getting much love anyway. These are sites that are hobbyist sites, or are corporate sites forever stuck kicking the can down the road.

In one sense, if EmDash takes off, further smoothing the edges of modern development, it could cause a drop in WordPress’ massive user base, which could harm the ecosystem of plugin-makers that support it. (Admittedly, though, it needs to work on the ramp-up process, which can be a bit confusing within Cloudflare’s own interface.)

But in another, these are the sites that are most likely to not update their WordPress installs in numerous years. And because of the way WordPress is designed, the site is a giant attack surface, always at risk of one PHP-based exploit or another. It is the Windows of content management systems, and that puts it in a position where some are just going to want a full reset.

As metaphors go, EmDash wants to be Linux Mint—something that feels like Windows, but has different guts. It may not work, but if we’re going to get rid of some of the internet’s old cruft, someone has to try.

I’m hopeful my messy, complex ShortFormBlog archive makes the leap.

Apple’s original logo explains so much about who Ronald G. Wayne actually is

If you know Ronald G. Wayne for anything, it is most assuredly for this logo, the first-ever Apple logo:

It’s a very novel logo—Newton under an apple tree, an Apple about to fall on his head. It’s graceful, but it breaks every rule of modern logo design—it can’t shrink to a letterhead, and it requires a second to figure out what’s going on. But it’s clear the logo was aiming for something else.

“It was done in a Gothic design. It was not a modern logo by any stretch of the imagination,” Wayne said of the work, his most visible contribution to one of the largest companies in the world.

It reflected a sense of whimsy around the work the company was doing, something Wayne picked up from co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the logo also reflects Wayne’s roots as a design draftsman, a skill he picked up when studying at the High School of Art and Design in New York. Later in life, a couple years after departing the fledgling Apple, that skill led to a contract role at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

But while the federal R&D lab hired him as a design draftsman, it was his skill as a model developer that caught the attention of its management. “My manager walks over and says, ‘Mr. Wayne, we’ve been looking at your resume, and you say you’re a compulsive model builder,’” Wayne recalled. He responded affirmatively. “They said, ‘Well, you’re no longer a design draftsman; you’re going to establish the laboratory’s first model shop.’”

And in the late 1970s, as the Apple II was reshaping the computing landscape, he was working on scale models for the federal government—including of a mirror fusion reactor project that dominated Livermore during the period.

That’s only one element of Wayne’s highly diverse career, which has seen him become an inventor, an author, a philatelist, an expert on monetary systems, and most recently, the star of a television commercial. (Also, he helped organize Atari’s parts room, which is a bigger deal than it sounds—as that organization likely helped the company get itself in position for its eventual acquisition by Warner Communications in 1976.)

Yes, he knew Steve Jobs before he became Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak before he became Woz. But he’s not just Apple.

In fact, he’s best described as a polymath. “The whole world was to me a sandbox with all the toys I could play with,” he told me in an interview. “I mean, I did so many different things because diversification was my hobby.”

Wayne, who never married, has instead put his energies into ambitious projects like a detailed model of the Nautilus, the submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He built the model in the early ’70s, and got to take a look at it again fairly recently.

The irony of Wayne’s life is that, despite being so uniquely talented, he never got a degree, which at times limited his upward mobility. For example, his time at Livermore ended partly because he didn’t have a degree; as the facility was tied to the University of Southern California, university rules barred him from joining the facility’s management.

“And that was the end of my experience at Lawrence Livermore,” he recalled. “Oh, but that was the most-fun job I had in my life.”

Yes, more fun than the job he had for two weeks at the company that was blowing up while he was building models.

Before Apple, he helped design important innovations in slot machines

Apple is a company that probably wouldn’t want to be associated with gambling today. But in 1976, the conversation that led to the company’s creation actually started with slot machines, because that was Wayne’s background. And his Atari co-worker Jobs, at least for a second, wanted in.

“He walked up to me one day and said, ‘I can get my paws on $50,000; let’s go into the slot machine business,’” Wayne said. “And I told him that would be the quickest way I could think of to lose $50,000.”

Jobs didn’t like that answer—but it likely led to the inevitable follow-up where he told Wayne about Woz. But there is a timeline where Ronald Wayne and Steve Jobs became slot-machine entrepreneurs, leaning on Wayne’s technical knowledge of the devices.

Because, see, Ronald G. Wayne was a natural fit to work at a company like Atari because, in the years before he joined the Pong-maker, he helped to develop some of the earliest electronic slot machines.

Wayne has said in the past that he was passionate about slot machines, not computers, which was part of the reason he ultimately exited the Apple partnership, and it’s clear from talking with him that he was not bluffing.

“I had a fascination with slot machines since childhood, when I was confronted with the first machine I ever got my paws on,” he recalled, noting that he heavily researched the machines before he designed them himself.

Many of them were mechanical in nature, reflecting their 19th century roots, and when Wayne finally got to try them out in Las Vegas in the 1950s, he saw the possibilities of bringing them beyond those roots.

“I saw all these mechanical slot machines all over everywhere, and I was then absolutely determined that there must be an easier way to do this,” Wayne recalled. That led him to work on a variety of designs, over a span of years. After much trial and error, he had something.

“I finally came up with a design that worked, and as a result, I wound up with the first certified gaming commission certified wholly electronic slot machine that wound up on the streets of Las Vegas,” Wayne said.

(Of his various patents, he has two from this era, during his time with Centaur Mini Computer Devices, including one slot machine.)

After that initial success, he worked on other machines, including an electronic craps table, which during that device’s qualification period for the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, created an unusual late-night moment at the Golden Nugget casino. But it’s one that might sound familiar to folks who know their Atari history.

“I got this call at 3 a.m. in the morning to go down to the casino and this guy had put in 240 quarters in that machine,” Wayne recalled. “And the next thing he did was to drop in one more quarter.”

That proved a problem, because all the bets were full on the machine, which meant he couldn’t actually keep playing. Wayne had to go out to the casino, manually override the block, and give the very drunk guy back his quarter.

“He finally threw the dice, hit a seven and got back I think 70 coins, and he passed out,” Wayne said. “Just the experiences we have in the gaming environment.”

Wayne said that despite his technical success, his own attempts to build a company around his slot machine designs ultimately proved fruitless. “I realized that I had no business being in business. I didn’t,” he said. “That’s one thing I lack, is any kind of decent business sense.”

He had more success contracting for others, but ultimately failed to set up a royalty structure for the devices he built. And when his company shut down, even though he legally could have walked away, he ended up paying his creditors back in full.

“I could have just walked away leaving all the debts behind because the corporation was responsible, not me,” Wayne recalled. “But that went against my grain; I just don’t function that way.”

It’s easy to see, in this light, why he was a bit gun-shy about reentering the slot machine business with Jobs … and, in the case of Apple, dealing with a potential liability risk as a founder. On the plus side, the experience led to one of his more fruitful personal projects: the Nautilus model.

“Somehow or other, I had to recover,” he said. “So I took on a recovery project, and that project was [the Nautilus].”

Some of Wayne’s more offbeat career paths: Selling stamps & pitching the gold standard

Stamp collecting is something Tedium has never actually covered, shockingly. But there may be no better way to introduce the concept of philately to the Tedium archive than highlighting how it became one of Wayne’s numerous interests.

It was a later-in-life hobby inspired by his brother Harmon, who was collecting stamps when he was a kid. What appealed to him was the imagery in the stamps:

What really fascinated me was this particular stamp I looked at when I was a very young kid. I look at the stamp and this is a photographic image of a president, I look closer at it and it’s made up of little tiny lines. Not a usual photograph, a whole series of little tiny lines that made this magnificent, camera-like image. I was fascinated by that.

The phenomenon he’s describing, called line-engraved intaglio, or “line engraving,” was an essential part of how stamps were made in the United States for more than a century, as well as many types of illustrations. These designs were painstakingly made by hand, and while this style can be made fairly easily in digital form today, stamp experts can easily tell the difference.

In the years after he left Apple, he opened a stamp shop called Wayne’s Philatelics, which he described as “moderately successful”—enough so that he was able to make it his full time job. And even after the store closed due to break-ins, he continued to collect and trade stamps. By 2016, he had more than a million stamps.

“And eventually I branched that out into coins, and I dealt stamps and coins through various stages for the next 40 years of my life,” he said.

The mention of coins points to another interest of his—monetary systems, a topic around which he has written multiple books. So, is he into crypto? No, much the opposite: Wayne feels that the monetary system has been on a path to disaster since it left the gold standard. It’s a belief, inspired by his reading of Adam Smith, that he’s stood behind for much of his life.

“I understood immediately, in 1968, that we were in trouble not only in The United States but worldwide because they took the whole world off of the gold standard,” he explained. “Which meant that every country in the world was running on what’s called fiat money. Instead of money backed by gold and silver, which had been the case for 2,400 years very successfully, now the world was running on Monopoly money.”

The fact that the system doesn’t have backing in the gold standard, he explained, means that there’s always pressure with governments who want to tweak the limits of what fiat money can do. In his view, the model always breaks down. “Every fiat currency in the world is turning to dust, and that will be complete within the next few years,” he added.

According to Wayne, this transference of value from traditional metals has already had an effect on the coin industry, where silver coinage has essentially disappeared from circulation in the 60 years since the Coinage Act of 1965. That law effectively led to coins being made of less-valuable materials, and to decades of hoarding by collectors.

“Where did it go? Into private hoards all over the country, including mine—because I knew what was coming,” Wayne said.

Wayne added that he shared his viewpoints with Jobs, who responded by buying $250,000 in gold, “but it didn’t sink in.” Jobs soon sold the gold for a modest profit.

“When it went up to $400,000, he sold it,” he recalled. “I mean, he learned absolutely nothing.”

Wayne talked about the financial system for roughly a fifth of our hour-long conversation. It’s clear that tinkering and collecting are where his passions lie, not Apple. He barely owns any Apple products, beyond an old iPad that he briefly flashed on the screen.

“It’s a facet of my life, and that facet has kind of drifted off into history,” he added.

Umbrel: From the kiddie pool to the deep end in record time

I wanted to like Umbrel more than I did, I think. Visually, it looks sharp, and it feels like it’s going to be a really painless experience to get going. But the problem is, if you know too much about how self-hosting works before you jump into this, you start asking too many questions.

Among them: Why can’t I change the Docker Compose files without the app resetting that file every time there’s a new version? (What’s the point of even having Docker Compose if you’re just going to delete my tweaks?) Why is it so hard to give this thing https support? And why do you have to set up your own version of the platform’s app store to add your own apps?

That made Umbrel a bewildering experience for me. It’s designed for people who want different things from self-hosting than I do—like bitcoin lockers and Tor connections. It’s a weird dichotomy that speaks to the pages of confused comments I saw in help forums.

Umbrel’s interface starts shallow, but hides a deep learning curve. Its advanced settings page had just a handful of options, not letting you change common defaults but instead pushing you to the terminal for literally everything. As a result, I found myself increasingly frustrated with this otherwise polished tool.

My tests:

» Set up the tool to support Tailscale: Easy enough to get going (the tool’s in the app store), but it’s unfortunately held back by Umbrel’s tendency to emphasize local access. The result is that you can install it, but with a lot of digging to figure out how to turn on https for the server. As I learned from looking at forums, many folks have been down this exact road before me, and some had given up. (For those who are lost: Use tailscale serve on every port you want to access remotely, adding https access as needed.) Grade: B-

» Install an app from the platform’s app store: I chose Solidtime, a time-tracking tool that I’ve been leaning into lately. While a slick app, it does an unwittingly excellent job of highlighting the folly of Umbrel’s security approach. Essentially, the local domain is hard-coded into the environment variables used by Docker Compose, and because Solidtime is a Laravel app, you can’t easily change anything. (You have to go into the terminal to update variables, for example.) I ended up breaking the app because I changed my email address in the app, which caused Solidtime to freak out. Solidtime sends a verification email to confirm the change. However, I didn’t have an email set up—and there was no easy way to do so in the interface—so I was unable to log back in. Adding Tailscale to the mix only worsened the problem. If you’re going to offer it in your app store, make it easier to tweak under the hood. Grade: D

» Install an app using Docker Compose: On the plus side, Umbrel does offer a route forward for this in the form of tools like Portainer and Dockge. These tools allow you to install and manage your own Docker containers relatively easily, even solving for the environment variable issues that I ran into with Solidtime. I installed Listmonk, an email tool I’ve been using, and in a matter of like five minutes, I had a working server, and a Tailscale command later, it had https. Problem is, this container is not visible to Umbrel, meaning you have to dig into a separate app to find it, sort of defeating the purpose of the clean interface. Overall though, this worked OK. Grade: B+

» Install a local LLM tool: I was ready to try AI on this, raring to go, but … installing OpenHands somehow broke Umbrel’s networking entirely. After 45 minutes of troubleshooting, landing repeatedly on unanswered support threads, I don’t have the energy to figure out why it broke. Honestly, I think I’ve made my point. Grade: F

When it comes to self-hosting, simple is a trap. You want knobs and standard approaches that match what everyone else is doing. You don’t want to have to painstakingly rebuild your electrical system while the power is still on. Because if something breaks, your house goes up in flames. Umbrel, unfortunately, showed why knobs matter.

Unraid: A hosting tool with knobs

I’ll be honest: Unraid is built for much more complex setups than a mini PC with a single drive. It encourages the use of drive formatting techniques like XFS and ZFS. And it doesn’t offer a friendly front page—though, if you want one of those, you can use a dashboard tool like Homarr or Glance.

But here’s the thing: Unlike Umbrel, it speaks roughly the same language as everything else. (Unraid’s been around for decades; it helped to define that language.) In other words, you are working with the tool, not against it. That leads to fewer fires thanks to robust documentation and a strong community.

The rub is that Unraid is not open-source, but its business model is still weekend-warrior friendly. You just need a $49 one-time license to keep your site going (with tiers that go up as you scale). That paid license comes with support that is likely to come in handy as you break things. Here’s how it went for me:

» Set up the tool to support Tailscale: Unraid has a deep integration with Tailscale that makes it a great choice if you want as much flexibility as possible. There’s a learning curve—it is admittedly confusing sometimes to determine whether a particular container should have Tailscale off or on—but it’s made up for by the fact that Unraid can manage the tool with scripts. I created a cron tool to turn off ports if the server went offline and vice versa. Grade: B+

» Install an app from the platform’s app store: I gave BentoPDF, a tool for manipulating everyone’s favorite file format, a spin. It is admittedly not a complex tool (I usually host it on my laptop), but it shows just how easy it is to get something like this set up. While I ran into some initial issues with Tailscale, they were easy to fix. Grade: A

» Install an app using Docker Compose: So, Unraid doesn’t natively support Docker Compose, favoring actual containers instead. But it is more than capable of doing so using a plugin for the task. Case in point: My issues with Solidtime on Umbrel did not follow me to Unraid. I ran into some permissions issues with the folders I needed, and the .env format was a bit prescriptive (Solidtime wanted laravel.env, but I was limited to just .env), but I got it working—and in a much more stable setup than with Umbrel. It was work, but work that made you feel like you were learning something. Big difference. Grade: A-

» Install a local LLM tool: For this one, I went with Open WebUI, which is one of the most popular tools of its kind, and downloaded Deepseek-R1 via an Ollama package. This is the part where more performant hardware matters. You’re not winning any land-speed records with this GPU, but Ollama can allocate roughly half the memory on this device (24GB) to the GPU, more than enough to run the 8 billon parameter DeepSeek models. My M1 with 16GB of RAM choked on this model, but this ran it fine once I added the right GPU variables. Grade: B

Overall, if you’re willing to pay—and more importantly, learn—Unraid is an excellent experience. And while it may not be built for a mini PC like this, it more than does the job.

Plus, if you want to, say, run a Linux install in a VM, it does the job pretty well. Proxmox, a similar tool that focuses more on VMs, is also good—but Unraid has a little more flexibility in the container direction. With Umbrel, you felt the limitations of the software right away. With Unraid, there’s still headroom.

HomeDock OS: The desktop apps are interesting, but …

Honestly, if it was just me, I would probably stop at Unraid and just move on with my Tailscale-simplified life. But this test needed more than just two entrants. So I dropped in another SSD and decided to install an app-based self-hosting tool that can be used on any distro.

That led me to HomeDock OS … which wasn’t the most fun choice for my particular setup.

The long and short of it is that the tool was not built to work with Tailscale. I could work around it (unlike Umbrel, HomeDock’s simply a Linux app), but it was a bit of a nightmare figuring that part out. I thought it was my distro. No, it was really some SSL drama that I eventually figured out with some purpose-built scripting.

It’s too bad, because HomeDock OS is a fascinating project—effectively an OS-like self-hosting experience, complete with windows, in your own browser. Unfortunately, I found myself having to navigate with SSL jank over and over. But unlike Umbrel, it was at least in the wheelhouse of what other tools do.

Eventually I figured it out, and found some interesting design decisions. I just wish it didn’t take me that long to get there.

Anyway, my tests:

» Set up the tool to support Tailscale: HomeDock OS doesn’t take any steps to support Tailscale out of the box, which is fine if it can play nice with it—or, honestly, give me an https connection at all. And whew, that’s where it struggled. I was never able to get their suggested homedock.local default URL to work, so Tailscale became my best option. I will note that it also supports Wireguard, but that felt like a pretty significant reset as I dug in, so Tailscale it was. (The strategy: install Tailscale’s cert, set the default url to your Tailscale URL, and enable ports as needed.) Grade: D

» Install an app from the platform’s app store: The novelty of being able to install desktop apps in a self-hosting tool was pretty good, I must admit. (Unraid also had these, but HomeDock puts them front and center of a fairly small app store.) I can see the case for loading up Krita from inside a browser, especially if, say, you’re on a work machine; I’m less convinced about the value of a nested Chromium. But word of warning that you might run into problems with Selkies, the remote desktop it relies on. (Because of how my keyboard was set up, I couldn’t bold or italicize anything.) Promising, but needs more work. (A point in its favor: Setting up Syncthing, which isn’t a desktop app, was painless.) Grade: B-

» Install an app using Docker Compose: The format on this is a little weird—you’re essentially importing Docker scripts into its proprietary format, which isn’t really that proprietary, really. Hey, still better than what Umbrel was doing. Honestly, I’d recommend using the supplied Portainer rather than building your own app store. You don’t get the nice icons, but you’ll actually get your container working in short order. That was how I got Penpot working in a matter of minutes. Grade: B-

» Install a local LLM tool: Given how popular LLM stuff is with self-hosting these days, I admit to being slightly surprised that AI stuff wasn’t all over HomeDock. It had some apps, though, such as Perplexica, an open-source take on Perplexity that was recently renamed Vane. I didn’t get amazing results using Deepseek (the Wikipedia page on “Why did the chicken cross the road?” was more informative than its answer), but if you want this in your arsenal, it works. (One knock against it: The tool is not packaged with Ollama, requiring a knotty separate download which adds complexity. Save yourself some grief: Just set up Ollama on Portainer.) Grade: B-

This one was a bit of a journey, and there are some quirks and weaknesses. I might have skipped the interstitial page when loading an app, and some of Portainer’s functionality should be HomeDock itself. But if you can look past those, HomeDock OS has plenty of potential.

Would I use this over Unraid? No. But given the newness of the tool, less than a year old, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

A mere six days before the 50th anniversary of Apple, the company quietly did something it has clearly wanted to do for a long time.

It killed the Mac Pro, a device with a lineage that dates back decades. While it has only been a Mac Pro since 2006, its real roots probably lie in the PowerMac G3 Blue & White, the first new tower produced since Steve Jobs’ return to Apple.

That device combined upgradeability with design chops, using a provocative metal-plus-plastic design to create a visual language that was all Apple’s. The most recent Mac Pro, and pretty much every Mac Pro since 2006, has been surrounded in metal. But that was the machine that set the stage for what this top-level Mac was supposed to be: A highly upgradeable screamer.

Again, there is no reason Apple needed to make this decision now. It could have just kept selling the M2 Ultra Mac Pro for a few more years. (Hey, it did it with the trash can.) But the decision to do so just before an important anniversary in its history? That’s sending a message.

The message is simple: We’re not about PCIe ports, we’re about buy-once, upgrade-never devices. Every other device in Apple’s lineup, barring a storage upgrade forced out of the Mac Mini and Mac Studio by clever hardware hackers, has avoided upgrades. And it’s done so for a long time.

The last laptop to offer upgradeable RAM was the 2012 MacBook Pro. It’s been about five years since Apple has offered an iMac or Mac Mini capable of aftermarket RAM upgrades. It’s not like the company was hiding it from us. This is what Apple is: A company that asks you to buy the most powerful machine you can afford up front, and then do it again in five to seven years.

Apple is not a company afraid of symbolism in the choices it makes. The original iMac famously eschewed legacy ports and floppy drives in favor of next-generation peripheral paradigms. The company dropped USB-A from its laptops when it was the most widely used port in the world. (Still is, honestly.) And Apple infamously avoided putting a fan in the earliest Macintosh units when those devices certainly could have used them.

I think the message Apple sends with this move is that a Mac is not the computer you buy if you want to open up the machine. Nor is it the machine you buy if you need ultra-specialized technology built by somebody else. Through slow decision-making and the minimization of key features desired by ultra-high-end professionals (i.e. external or third-party GPUs, and before that, any support for Nvidia GPUs at all), the company self-selected its audience. For a while, Apple sort of let this community live by essentially ignoring the Hackintosh community, essentially avoiding becoming a Nintendo-style heavy, going after its own enthusiast base. (On that Nvidia point, the bitterness is so strong that the company tried to avoid using them for Apple Intelligence. Maybe Tim has let this beef go too far?)

Meanwhile, it tried solving the problems that plagued portions of that user base in different ways. It continued improving Thunderbolt until it got to the point where it was good enough for most use cases that don’t involve graphics but might have involved a PCIe slot. It built the Mac Studio, a small-meets-fast take on a machine that Apple has periodically tried to build at various points over the past quarter-century. (The G4 Cube was obviously where Apple wanted to go, but the miniaturization just wasn’t there.)

Last year, I explained that Canva’s decision to make its Affinity graphics software free was a move to neutralize the power users. For large companies, power users carry a stigma of sorts. They complain a lot. They want more specific things. And they have high expectations that are often more technical in nature.

Apple marks a lot of its products as “pro,” sure, but it has never wanted to be in the power user business. Sure, it might offer AppleScript or Automator, but it doesn’t expect 90% of people to even know what those are, let alone use them.

The downside for actual power users is that there are no real alternatives to the quite-impressive ARM architecture the company has built over the past decade. I spotted a few people in the vintage Apple community suggesting that ARM chips just aren’t good enough for professional tasks, but that’s pure cope. They just want the giant device with no compromises because of the power-user message it sends.

But Apple is a company that expects you to compromise. In 2012, when I bought my first MacBook Pro, the compromise was “you can either get the thinner machine with the nicer screen and no upgradeable RAM, or the old machine that’s a lot thicker and still has those RAM slots.” The MacBook Neo is a bet that you are willing to compromise on RAM and a backlit keyboard; the MacBook Air is a bet that you’re willing to compromise on having a fan in your laptop. Even the Mac Studio, which until recently allowed you to spec it with half a terabyte of RAM, was a bet that you’re willing to compromise a lot of money and internal upgradeability for a machine that screams.

There’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t want to compromise, if your favorite parts of Apple were the parts that you could jailbreak or Hackintosh your way around. But with the decision to retire the Mac Pro, a device that Apple has only half-heartedly sold for the past 15 years, Apple is making explicit what has been obvious for decades: It is not the power user company.

Sure, you can harness powerful things with Macs or iPhones or iPads. But this company would rather you think of your computers like appliances that serve a purpose and eventually get replaced. Don’t like that? Plenty of other ecosystems can serve you. I hear Linux is getting pretty good these days.

That’s the message that will carry Apple into the next 50 years.

Pancakes are not my favorite thing to make. They require me to make a messy, gloppy mixture of wheat, milk, and eggs. They come out imperfectly every time. And when you’re done with them, you’ve created a bunch of heavy, saggy discs. (However, not floppy disks.)

But they can be made quickly, and by the thousands. There’s a reason why greasy spoons the world over specialize in pancakes: Anyone can make them, and they can do so quickly, without too much thought.

But they leave a hell of a mess behind. (Especially after the syrup gets involved. God, the syrup. There’s so much of it, and little of it actually gets sopped up by the bread discs you made yourself.)

Sure, you can automate the process—I hear there are frozen pancakes, in case you like your frisbees to melt into food—but nothing is quite like making pancakes yourself.

Just one problem. When everyone does it, all pancakes look the same, they’re greasy, eating them makes you tired and bloated, and it’s hard not to want to grab a yogurt or something instead.

My wife loves them though, so I make them frequently.

When Everything Feels Flat

This is a pretty good metaphor for why some describe the discussion on social networks as being flat at times. AI is the natural example of this: It’s either love it or hate it. (And don’t take that to mean I want a bunch of pro-AI content in my feed. It’s very possible to argue against AI really well, as Ed Zitron frequently does in some of the longest blog posts I’ve ever seen.)

Politics are another, and that often leads to the most polarized takes dominating the discussion. Nuanced takes are hard to come by, and if you do make one, it’s most certainly going be drowned out by every other pancake in the stack.

Every take has a beginning and end, and then you throw another one on the griddle. Most end up a little burnt. Occasionally one slides off the pan, as a work of art.

But most of the time, pancakes fall over themselves, one flat discussion point after another. It’s easier to spit out a ten-word takedown of someone’s bad take than to offer real nuance as a discussion point.

Which is why I love blogs. Rather than offering up little discs of information that can be created quickly and digested slowly, you can spend as long or as short a time as you want on them. You can put a mere 30 minutes into them; you can put in 30 days. You can do as much or as little research as you want, and you can lay out an argument with a far different shape than your average pancake.

In many ways, that’s kind of why I’m keeping an eye on the AT Protocol, which is just starting to get good. That will help to make room for more colors and shapes than the 300ish characters you see on Bluesky.

Pancakes: Not The Only Thing On The Menu

Recently, I’ve found myself clicking through Kagi’s Small Web interface. It’s effectively the same concept as Stumbleupon, except more focused on helping you find interesting voices and actual blogs.

I was excited when I found it.

They lead to the kinds of posts that social media would never let go viral on their own but are nonetheless super-interesting. A few examples I found with a little searching:

1. This piece by Max Mautner on his decision to not own a car.
2. This project by Bogdan Buduroiu to go on an “AI lent,” where he goes 40 days without using AI to code.
3. A tale about how Brad Frost, a web designer, used AI to redesign his websitewhile working on a mural in his bathroom, not touching his keyboard at all.
4. A post from Nathan Vass, a bus driver/writer/director who loves driving a bus as much as he does shooting a film.
5. A list of bespoke shoemakers from Permanent Style, a men’s fashion blog. I don’t care about shoes or men’s fashion, but I do care about bespoke shoemakers.

There are gaps. I did not see a lot of women or much in the way of Black culture in these posts, for example. (I did spot a post titled “6 Ways to Make the Cheese World More Inclusive,” but that’s only after I narrowed in on food.) Many authors kind of looked like me—a middle-aged white dude who has been blogging half his life. That’s super-unfortunate, and I wonder if the push towards social platforms has meant that blogs have lost some of their diversity as folks have moved elsewhere. (But it could also be an effect of its sourcing: Kagi built its initial lists from a number of Hacker News threads, among other places. Fortunately, anyone can add to it via its GitHub page.)

And while it doesn’t put it front and center like Google does, Kagi is not afraid of AI, and it’s clear that the skepticism about it that permeates some social media platforms doesn’t necessarily extend to the blogs.

But Kagi essentially revived blog discovery by bringing back an old idea in a new way. I hope it becomes huge.

Eating Fewer Pancakes

I can tell that the interest in a more primitive form of communication is coming back. My RSS subscriber count recently passed my newsletter subscriber count for the first time—in part because someone put me on a list somewhere and that list went viral.

That’s honestly the kind of thing I’ve been waiting to happen for a long time. I wrote a post about why I wanted blogging to come back seven freaking years ago.

But strangely, I find myself struggling to post as much as I used to.

I’ve been trying to figure out why blogging, a medium I absolutely adore and that I’ve dedicated much of my adult life to, has felt so tough to do over the last six months or so. I think the answer, as far as I see it, is that my loosey-goosey experiment in writing when I feel like it has failed.

It’s not that I don’t feel like it. It’s that it’s too easy to let every other pancake fall on top of the thing I actually care about. The result is a lopsided plate that often feels too overwhelmed to do the thing I originally set out to do.

With that in mind, it is my hope that I can re-commit to this thing I love by making a pledge I hope to stick to: Tuesday and Thursday evenings, twice a week, starting in April. That’s where Tedium started in 2015, and that’s where it should end back up. If I have something ready to go, I’m going to have to sit on it for a couple of days. If I don’t, I’m going to have to live with that pressure. I’m the kind of guy who works best with a deadline. My problem is that, by removing that deadline, I find it easier to let other things dominate.

And that might mean that I post less on other platforms, where I’m just filling up on pancakes anyway. I’ll still post on Bluesky and Mastodon, but it needs to not be the first place I look in the morning.

Maybe I can click through Kagi’s Small Web thing for inspiration instead. As far as I can tell, it’s serving up more than pancakes.

If you’re a longtime reader of Tedium, you might be aware of my ongoing fascination with first-run syndication—TV shows that skip the network and instead get sold to local channels to air whenever.

In the days before we found a fourth network, this model was an essential part of what made independent stations work. Some of the most popular television shows of all time—Star Trek: The Next Generation, Baywatch, The Muppet Show—relied on syndication to spread. It also was key to keeping shows alive in the culture long after their original runs. Charles In Charge, for example, likely would be forgotten today had it not successfully made the leap.

It also made for a more attractive business model for show creators, who were at the mercy of the network to ask for more product. As explained in a 1986 piece from the Knight Ridder wires:

What happened? It’s simple economics.

National advertisers learned their dollars went further buying spots in syndicated cartoon shows, where the commercials reach kids five times a week, rather than in network shows, which are on Saturdays only. They began to flock to syndicated shows.

At the same time, the cartoon-makers smelled a much better deal for themselves, Networks usually order only 13 episodes of a new cartoon show, then may order only six more new ones for the following season. It takes about 65 episodes for a show to be profitably syndicated.

Good deal for the production company, great deal for advertisers. Easy enough to figure out.

But a lot has changed in 40 years, and a big decision on the part of NBCUniversal explains why. This week, the company announced it would be shutting down its first-run syndication business, killing Access Hollywood, The Steve Wilkos Show, and other programs. (The still-on-the-air Kelly Clarkson Show, also distributed by NBCUniversal, already announced its plans to end its run this year.)

“NBCUniversal is making changes to our first-run syndication division to better align with the programming preferences of local stations,” the company said in a statement to Variety. (It emphasized it was “very proud of the teams” that made the show.)

While other shows are likely to continue—Live With Kelly and Mark, Drew Barrymore, and Jennifer Hudson are mainstays—there haven’t been any new shows announced to replace the departing series. The model is in real risk of shrinking away, as audiences and advertisers head online.

We used to syndicate the best stuff.

If it were to happen, it wouldn’t be the first time first-run syndication evolved away from a format. In the ’70s, it helped keep network-shunted variety shows like Hee Haw alive. In the ’80s, it gave us weekday cartoons like DuckTales and G.I. Joe. And in the ’90s, it became the home base of heady sci-fi like Babylon 5. These formats, one by one, have moved elsewhere.

The Variety piece suggests first-run syndication is a dying medium. But that’s only really for some types of programs. For some program types, particularly game shows, first-run syndication is secretly doing better than prime time, at least if you narrow the scope to what actually gets broadcast on television. In the most recent week on Nielsen, Wheel of Fortune got better linear television ratings than any show in prime time, and Jeopardy! was right behind it. (The only show that tops them is their common lead-in, ABC World News Tonight.) And the newness of the program doesn’t determine its success, either: Judge Judy drove 5.1 million viewers last week, all the more impressive given its last new episode came out five years ago. (Repeats spring eternal, after all.)

Just one of NBCUniversal’s own shows, a syndicated repackaging of Dateline, appeared in the top 10. And two shows similar to Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition, outpace it. Put another way, the medium might be in decline in general, but NBCUniversal was likely feeling it more than anyone else. Its most popular show is reheated leftovers.

Trash TV like TMZ and reality court shows are likely not going away in the near future—they’re cheap to produce and, for the right kind of person, addictive. But they may not be with us forever.

Byron Allen is one of the few people who has figured out how to consistently make syndication profitable in 2026.

Maybe this model just doesn’t work for giant companies like NBCUniversal

Eight years ago, in a piece titled “TV’s Hidden Math,” I described first-run syndication as an innovative model that favored creators. In the piece, I drew on a 1986 quote from Edwin T. Vane, a syndicator with Westinghouse’s Group W Productions that I think explains why this model stuck:

“The producer can’t make any money on the first network run,” Vane explained. “He may be on the network four years and still not have enough episodes to syndicate, That’s not a very attractive business.”

It may not be attractive for a large network, but if you aim lower, it can still be plenty successful as a business.

Some, such as Byron Allen, have tried to keep it alive. His Comics Unleashed, whose original run dates back to 2006, is likely to be the replacement for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. (It already replaced After Midnight, and Allen, a media mogul who just bought a huge chunk of Starz, has a lot of episodes of the long-running program in his archives.) His model, which essentially involves giving the network the program for free, along with some of the ad revenue, is likely why CBS went for it. “It’s not cheaper,” Allen told the Los Angeles Times last year. “It’s zero.”

As media moguls go, Barry Diller is one of my faves. I can take or leave Eisner.

And then there’s In Depth with Graham Bensinger, a long-form interview show that has managed to outlast many programs of its kind. It’s a rare beast in 2026: A syndicated TV show distributed independently by its creator, one that oddly got its start on regional sports networks.

Bensinger knows his television history. In recent weeks, he released interviews with both Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, who once tried to parlay ’70s-era syndication success with Star Trek into a dedicated Paramount network. (Diller, for what it’s worth, has soured on the modern-day Paramount.) The ploy didn’t work, but it nonetheless proved the latent power of the model Bensinger has spent the past 15 years exploiting.

It is absolutely fitting that he talked to both of them, as Bensinger may be the last man standing on first-run syndication. He’s already outlasted NBCUniversal’s entire syndication business.

One of the reasons why companies like Substack have such a strong hold on creators is pretty simple: It’s hard to build a paywall.

You have to deal with a lot of really hard stuff, like logins and payment methods. And you’re dealing with vendors left and right. Your readers’ passwords get spread around the internet like wildfire, and honestly, do you want to contribute to that?

And worst part: If you use things like magic links, your readers might find themselves having to log in a dozen times.

Recently, I talked to Nieman Lab about the magic link issue, and between that and my recent Substack rant, I’ve come up with a couple of thoughts. I’m sort of at a point where I think the best way to solve the platform problem is to make it as easy as possible to put a paywall in front of anything. Even a static website.

And it needs to be a kit that anyone can follow, with as many open source parts as possible.

But there are a couple of problems: First, while payment technologies like Stripe are widespread, they are probably just above the knowledge range of the average person. Second, readers are unlikely to trust a website they’re not familiar with or have never used before. Finally, you don’t want to be managing more personally identifying information than you have to.

I have a solution to this, and it’s Ko-Fi, the creator economy tipping platform.

Ko-Fi: Sorta like a platform, but not really

Why Ko-Fi, you might ask? Well, a couple of things: First, it has avoided the trap that Patreon has run into with the App Store, which has forced that company to reset its model repeatedly. Second, its model is flexible and easy to parse—you can put as little or as much work into it as you want, a sharp difference from the pressure that comes with running a Patreon or a Kickstarter.

Finally, its pricing model is extremely fair and strongly favors the creator. If you’re making a lot of money, you can pay $12 a month for its Gold plan and that’s the service’s full cut. As platforms go, it is one of the best of its kind. You can do everything on the Ko-Fi platform, or you can do nothing. That is the right level of respect for creatives that a crowdfunding platform needs. (The similar Buy Me a Coffee could also work for this, but it doesn’t have the Gold plan, which means Ko-Fi is significantly cheaper if you grow really big.)

Plus it has something really easy to work with from a development standpoint: Webhook support. A webhook, for the uninitiated, is basically a way to tell a web application to do something by visiting a URL. It’s sort of foundational to how modern web applications work.

(I will note that Patreon supports them as well, but with references to wanting to focus on its core experience, which effectively means support may be hard to come by.)

One webhook, an open-source ecosystem

While you can bury webhooks in code, they are also plenty useful in automation platforms like Zapier. As you may be aware, Zapier and I had a falling-out a few years ago, but the good news is that there’s a quite-good open-source alternative called Activepieces. It can be hosted anywhere, even on an old laptop, and the self-hosting platform PikaPods also supports them.

On top of this, you don’t need to be tethered to an email platform to send out emails. Thanks to email sending tools like Listmonk and Keila, it is possible to send emails out to thousands of people using self-hosted software. (PikaPods also supports Listmonk, but sadly not Keila.)

Alas, platforms like Gmail tend to be finicky about the senders they’re comfortable with, so you’re probably stuck with something like Amazon SES or Mailgun. SES, it should be noted, costs a grand total of 10¢ for a thousand emails, meaning you can send out messages to thousands of people a few times a month for less than $10.

So we know that we’re probably stuck with Ko-Fi for payments and a large bulk sender for email, but you can basically run the rest of this stack using open-source tooling. Our flow looks like this:

1. A person subscribes to a Ko-Fi membership that costs them maybe three bucks per month.
2. After the transaction, Ko-Fi hits a webhook managed by Activepieces, which triggers a JavaScript package that interacts with Listmonk.
3. With Activepieces’ prodding, Listmonk adds the user to a paid list, then sends an email to the subscriber with a tokenized link to a webpage on your site.
4. That webpage, after you enter a passcode, adds a first-party cookie that allows you to disable advertising on the website, or opens up new parts of the site, or what have you.
5. When you send emails, you tailor your emails for that paid list.

No complicated content management system—in fact you can run this playbook on any page that uses JavaScript and CSS. Got a static site and want to gate your content? There are your marching orders. If you want, you can even set up an RSS feed to go through Listmonk, so once you get the templates set, you can forget it.

Plus, it’s cheap, while limiting platform exposure to the things you have no business doing. Just a webpage, a single platform, a bulk email service, and a couple of open-source apps that you can host just about anywhere. Sounds crazy, right? Well, this is what I spent the last day or so building. And … it works.

The art of loose magic

You might be wondering, how do you secure this? Easy: Magic links, but with a twist. Basically, one of the frustrating things about magic links is that you have to load a new one every time you want to log in somewhere. Instead, I decided to build a low-key two-factor system. As an end user, you’re asked to click a specific link, and then enter a code that’s in the email. Don’t have the code? Email doesn’t match the hash? You’re not getting in.

(For the nerds, it’s using HMAC tokenization to keep things client-side as best as possible.)

But this approach does have some flexibility that standard magic codes don’t. The code only works in a certain time frame—about a month, with a grace period during the month after, but it does not expire the second you click. That makes it so that you can share it with other devices more easily, or with a coworker who you think would love Tedium if not for the modest amount of ads.

As for the decision to use passcodes: It’s important to have a secure posture, but let’s be honest, if you’re hosting articles about exploding pop bottles, people shouldn’t be sharing their passwords with you. But this approach means that you can share a login over a limited amount of time.

My goal is to eventually share this as a “kit” of sorts on GitHub, that anyone can follow. I will probably put something behind a paywall for it (probably some starter email templates designed by yours truly), just to prove it works, but also to support the project.

Anyway, Tedium does not have a paywall, really. Instead, it’s more of a way to turn off ads. If you would like to try it, sign up for a $3 monthly membership on Ko-Fi.

(By the way: I plan to expand to existing paid supporters soon, whether on Patreon or Ko-Fi. I talked about this about a year ago, but it has taken time to finally get it across the finish line. But this weekend, the pieces fell together.)

This was a fun project, and it took me about a day, start to finish, to get something working. If you’re a Substacker looking at the abyss, let me be clear: You can do it too.

So, this is not a normal issue of Tedium. I have been messing around with some email design stuff recently, and I decided to try out an experimental new layout. This was built using MJML, an email scripting tool, and converted after the fact to CSS grid. And it’s about my favorite topic: How much I dislike Substack. You may find this over the top, or annoying, or weird. But it got my brain going, and that to me is the important part. Anyway, let’s get to it.

I have a problem: Unlike most people, I actually read my spam folder on a regular basis. (Often, they’re some of the most interesting emails I get.) I find spam to be intriguing, interesting, and often highlighting some modern trends.

And sometimes, it surfaces something I actually care about that missed my other folders, like an upcoming interview I’m excited to share with all of you.

But one thing about spam that has been true across the board is that it’s ugly. Really, really ugly. Often, what will happen with spam is that they’ll get your email address through questionable means, say a leak of your information in an exploit, and flood your inbox with some of the worst crap you’ve ever seen.

But recently, some of these clearly trash emails have gotten a design upgrade:

That is a relatively attractive spam email, trying to sell me on a scam. It is obviously the work of one Claude A. Fakeguy.

It has that swing. Other, less attractive spam emails also have this swing, such as this one:

But what I think the real tell is that these emails hang together when you have images off, which they did not in the past. This is a problem, because in your spam folder, images are automatically turned off.

Hence why this email warning me that my antivirus plus renewal failed now looks like this:

This is a funny, if troubling element in the history of spam—and probably a spot of bad news for people who use vibe coding to actually make real things.

The slop looks more competent than ever

Put simply: Now that the baseline of what makes something well-designed, albeit spartan, has increased, many of the signs we once used to detect a spam message are getting thrown out the window.

Which means that we’re more likely to get hit by spam that tricks us into clicking. And that’s bad news as we attempt to protect ourselves from the crap hiding in our inbox. We’re likely to trust less and accidentally give away more. And untrustworthy figures who don’t know how to code are more likely to throw more crap our way.

This is a point Anthropic itself pointed out in one of its own reports from last summer, about “no-code” ransomware that can be built by people incapable of actually building ransomware without the help of an LLM.

Despite this, these people can create commercial malware programs that they can sell for up to $1,200 a pop.

The security platform Guard.io makes clear that platforms like Lovable are going to enable a new class of criminal:

Just like with “Vibe-coding”, creating scamming schemes these days requires almost no prior technical skills. All a junior scammer needs is an idea and access to a free AI agent. Want to steal credit card details? No problem. Target a company’s employees and steal their Office365 credentials? Easy. A few prompts, and you’re off. The bar has never been lower, and the potential impact has never been more significant. That’s what we call VibeScamming.

And, for people who vibe code, the real problem is that, long-term, their stuff is going to look very untrustworthy because of the specific mix of chrome, color, and emojis that vibe-coded applications specialize in.

The thing that ultimately makes something look human is the addition of actual design and human flair. I encourage you to actually put a little humanness into what you build if you’re going to do it and share it with the world.

How to spot a vibe-coded faker

But for many, it is going to be harder than ever to tell what’s real and what’s fake. Which means you should probably go out of your way to use techniques like email obfuscation and email aliases to protect yourself. (It makes it easier to tell which bread-baking forum violated your trust, for one thing.)

On the plus side, there are still tells. A key one is if they refer to you by not your name, but the name of your email address. Another is the from address, which is often some highly obfuscated bit of junk designed to evade detection.

The one that made me laugh recently was when I got really crappy spam emails on an address that has never gotten them for the first time, promoting traditional spam topics with a Claudecore flair. They seemed random, but were extremely easy to get rid of, because they were all emailed from a bare Firebase domain, meaning that I could remove them with the help of a single filter.

Just because spam emails are more attractive now doesn’t mean the people making them aren’t still extremely stupid.

So, here’s something that I didn’t expect to be saying in 2026: There seems to be a nonzero chance that Markdown might become the new RSS.

“Whoa, crazy talk! It’s not even a protocol!” I hear you saying. But the evidence has seemed to pick up of late in a couple of different directions.

The first is the budding interest in publishing on the AT Protocol, which is working to solve the network-effect challenges that have forced many of us to send newsletters rather than post blogs on RSS feeds.

That’s exciting, if incredibly niche. But simultaneously, massive developer platforms are starting to offer something called “Markdown for Agents”—something Cloudflare announced late last week, and which Laravel Cloud quickly followed up on a few days later. And Vercel jumped on it a couple of weeks ago.

(The news wasn’t all good for Markdown, but most of it was.)

Some SEO old hands, like my friend Jon Henshaw, have reacted to this news with skepticism, having had bad old memories of Google AMP and its sibling technologies Signed Exchanges and Core Web Vitals:

It’s 2026, and now I’m reading everywhere that all our pages must have Markdown versions, and it feels like AMP (and SXG and CWV) all over again. Except this time, the promise is that AI agents will better understand and interact with your site if you have them. The rationale is that HTML is too complex and consumes too many tokens to parse and analyze content. Whereas Markdown pages, with their simplicity, are ideal.

(Side note: Core Web Vitals make me want to pull my hair out.)

Jon is a smart guy and follows this stuff closer than me (Coywolf News is a great site), but I will casually defend this push towards Markdown as a lingua franca of the Web. (Not the agentic Web. Just the Web. More on that later.) I actually think it’s really a great move for publishers that comes with way fewer inherent issues than Google AMP ever did.

For one thing, this is all standards-based, not something that was just invented that you need to manage. It’s literally using existing content negotiation headers that web servers already support, not forcing folks to learn something new. Plus it’s hard to argue with a point like this from Vercel:

A typical blog post weighs 500KB with all the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, the same content as Markdown is only 2KB. That’s a 99.6% reduction in payload size.

That’s good for budget-minded AI agents, but it’s also good for people who run websites.

Additionally, Markdown has been in increasingly wide use for 20 years, and it keeps growing in popularity—and unlike the weird carousels and oddly specific rules of Google AMP, lots of people know how to use it. And the use of headers to deliver Markdown pages is already baked into Web standards, just waiting for folks to use it.

This is really a tactic to help site owners avoid an AI-generated hug of death

Plus, there’s the rendering—Markdown is an antidote to the internet we currently run, which is highly dependent on programming languages and visual tricks that AI agents and honestly most people don’t even need. To me, when I see, “Cloudflare wants to give every webpage a Markdown version,” my thought is essentially, “Oh, they want to make AI agents stop DDoSing these poor PHP servers that still dominate the internet.”

When I see publishers talking about how their sites are getting flooded with viewers and getting slammed with unwanted hosting bills, it is clear that what we are doing is not tenable. Having Cloudflare put up a static Markdown file that takes up less space and has 0% of the JavaScript of the main page sounds like a win to me.

And if you’re building your pages semantically, as many publishers are likely already doing because they want to rank on Google, converting all that content to Markdown is going to be a cinch. Frequent Tedium skepticism target Matt Mullenweg is pushing for its addition to the WordPress.org website.

Just imagine, if you’re running an open-source project, and you didn’t have to force your users to see a loading page with anime characters just to keep the site online. Instead, you could tell Claude and Gemini and Perplexity to grab the data in a format they already use, and serve that in a static form, saving your poor forum from being drowned in dynamic requests.

There are lots of ethical qualms with AI, and you may want to just block them entirely, as is your right as a site owner. But I think diminishing a new-every-load HTML page to an unchanging Markdown file could save a lot of processing cycles for legacy server owners who have been trying to keep an extremely popular wiki online for 20 years.

I think there are websites and forums out there that have been absolutely wrecked by the rise of AI. Cloudflare, while still facing periodic reputational issues, has offered itself up as a line of defense for publishers. That’s noble—and while I get not everyone likes them, I think this particular offering is a good-for-the-internet move long-term.

But hear me out: What if we just offered our pages in Markdown because it made the internet more accessible?

Yes, the reason for all of this is AI, because everything is about AI right now, but honestly, it would be a really awesome thing to offer for regular users, too.

Recently, I’ve been trying to take on a project with the Tedium website—it’s not quite done yet, but I’m trying to get the whole thing onto the AT Protocol, mimicking my upload of my Twitter archive to Bluesky. (I’ve gotten the upload to work, it’s just the details that need to be tweaked. Here’s a sample post that came out okay.) I’m using a tool called Sequoia, which makes it possible to plug a static site into the same protocol Bluesky uses. It parses the roughly 1,300 pages and then uploads them to a server on the ATmosphere.

At the center of this is something called Standard.site, which aims to make a space for long-form content on the AT protocol. It’s not prescriptive to Markdown, though you could use it to share posts in Markdown if you wanted. It sounds promising—and like the budding efforts in the fediverse, it aims to make content easier to discover. Which is the problem RSS hoped to solve a quarter-century ago, admittedly—but this is doing it with more glue.

To me, I see a connection between the push to make Markdown an undercurrent of the agentic Web and this weird experiment on the fringes of emerging social tech. And honestly I would not be surprised if web browsers plugged into these AI-targeted Markdown feeds to give users a lightweight experience. (You know what else could use this?!? Email.)

It’s so fascinating, seeing this thing I’ve come to really appreciate as a writer turn into this ad-hoc building block of the modern internet. Even if I find it uncomfortable that AI is the vessel it rode in on.

When I found it, it was my superpower—the tool I used to plow through five articles a day at a new job. It was the cruft-buster, the starting point, the README file. And now it’s become something else entirely—something that could get us back to basics without the extra cruft of AMP or the stress of Core Web Vitals. (And even better, that didn’t come from Google.)

Honestly, I’m kind of here for it.

Update 02/18/2026

Looks like I’m not the only one thinking in this direction. Shout-out to Brett Terpstra, a guy who knows a thing or two about Markdown.