Dave Winer

  • Courtney – are you writing all these posts?? this volume is making the site fairly unusable for other things.

  • Toni responded on Bluesky. I couldn't fit my reply in 300 chars, so I wrote it here.

    Toni, thanks for responding. Lot of food for thought here.

    My main interest is text, I want to be part of a network on the web that allow us to write text in one place and have it show up anywhere a person wants to read it.

    Think of it like podcasting, which ends each show with this -- "Tune in Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts." This imho is why podcasting has remained unowned, where we can't say the same for what blogging has become.

    I think the standard.site project shows how it should work inside the AT Proto world and we can use RSS 2.0 to bridge to the rest of the web. The value you have here is a consensus among a few developers as to how they want to work in the same space that Bluesky runs in, but in order for it to be more than a demo, imho, they have to have access to the millions of Bluesky users. Otherwise imho nothing will happen, beyond a demo of what could be, and that would be a waste. They're doing really good work, and other devs are watching. ;-)

    Now to the questions you ask..

    There's plenty of prior art in Facebook which has never had a character limit, and style and links are handled by HTML. Real text in a social media platform is very straightforward. And X is easing their character limit, and makes it possible for me to post something like this in their system, but could not post it on Bluesky.

    Put a "See more" link at the end of the 300 chars, or 500 or whatever you decide on to show in the timeline, and when you click the link the lower border scrolls down ad the rest of the text appears. A vertical scrollbar could be used as well. (In FeedLand and RSS.chat we don't even include the "see more" link, just click on the text and it expands, click again and it returns to its default height.)

    Now for the other types, pictures follow the same pattern. Cut the display off at the same point you cut the text off, and one click to see the rest, with no need to go to another site (a major impediment, people hate clicking on links because of paywalls, and other noise that you almost always get when you click a link. The web as it is has trained people that clicking a link is asking for a lot of questions and then you still don't get to finish reading the article. In this mode, you'd guarantee a peaceful transition, because you care about the user experience.

    I would also like to see enclosures so you can do podcasting here too.

    The other types you mention are great, you should be able to fit in too, but each would need their own UI design, and a bunch of trials, and search for prior art so you can learn from others experience. You're blazing a trail, which is good. This segment of the industry has been stagnant for far too long.

    BTW, I explained my goal when I started this work at textcasting.org. The tagline is "Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text."

    It really is that simple. Podcasting was built out of MP3, RSS and smartphones. This system, when we realize interop among platforms will also build on RSS and Markdown, imho -- it plays the role that MP3 played in podcasting. It's the payload. And people love markdown for its simplicity and transparency.

    I think you have one of the most interesting challenges in tech now, and you have a good shot at pulling it off, representing the part of the web that wants to be part of the web as opposed to the others who want to be the web.

  • Advice for Toni at Bluesky

    I happen to know Toni Schneider the new CEO of Bluesky, from his tenure at Automattic. I have some ideas for him, people that follow me will recognize them. ;-)

    hey toni, i'm sure everyone is giving you advice on how to evolve your two products, Bluesky and AT Proto. i am no exception. :-)

    i think you have to merge the two. make it so that the writing tools you've attracted, that don't fit in with the 300-char limit, and other restrictions you have inherited from twitter, are first class citizens on Bluesky.

    When I write in Pckt, i should be writing a Bluesky post. Simple limits, basically what Markdown supports (people love Markdown).

    Twitter's limits imho were a good idea at first in 2006, but they have already started getting rid of the limits, and it has made a big difference in the medium.

    in other words, i think you and your users need what leaflet, pckt et al are doing. and their posts should be first class citizens on bluesky and that means relaxing the limits.

    i see the developers struggling to try to create a namespace for their products, but nothing they come up with can compete with bluesky, nor should it -- the users only know the bluesky name, trying to start something new here gives you a third name of something technical for people to learn, and in the end it'll be what bluesky becomes, because twitter is already getting rid of the limits. and twitter is, like it or not, still the leader in this space.

    btw, this editor would fit in there nicely, but i decided in 2017 that i wasn't going to try any longer trying to fit into the hodgepodge of different regulations for each of the social media systems.

    anyway, you could be the leader in this space, not by dominating but by dropping the barriers. a bluesky that keeps the limits while twitter is removing them is a bad place to be. you have to be the scrappy innovator, again imho of course.

  • Are you networky?

    I posted this here, and it will also appear in FeedLand.

    We're starting to find the networky-ness of the web coming back to life.

    A few simple protocols is all it takes. ;-)

  • Milestone, nightly backups for real

    I was doing too much work to set up a root backup, and i want it to be super easy.

    Claud obliged, in a few minutes the whole thing including a glue script was written.

    It's starting to become a groove. The turnaround is amazing.

  • Maybe what we should do is really jump on this from rss.chat.

  • courtney -- the idea is that there's one web.

    so wordpress is on the web and mastodon is on the web.

    so doesn't it follow that they work incredibly well with each other?

    someone has to go first. that can be us.

  • For Courtney

    courtney thanks for the challenging question on twitter.

    i've thought about it some -- and i think you should try out feedland.

    you can create a free account on feedland.com (run by Automattic) or feedland.org (run by me).

    it's the other half of rss.chat. where this app is generating exactly the kind of feeds for the web i imagine, feedland is ready to work with those feeds. it's just we need to work on a new simpler UI to fit in here.

    but it's easy to use compared to wordpress. and it does a lot of things no feed reader does. its design is patterned after social media app UIs. as is the editor in rss.chat (and wordland.social).

    i know that this is a lot to aborb, but in your position at this time, imho you're doing the right thing, looking around to see what's out there. the wordpress world doesn't do much of that in my experience.

  • WordPress Lite

    i started writing about it this morning and then i re-read something about the stock value tanking, there's actual data about that, and the only thing a company can do when the stock goes down like that is get a new CEO. it's almost the definition of what boards do.

    i'm sure matt reminded them (as he reminded everyone today) that he keeps a lot of power no matter what the company does. and after a while of that the value keeps going down and they realize they either have to resign or do the deed.

    the thing is, the company needs to do some bold product moves, and they have AI positioned as something that works inside WP, instead of seeing WP and working inside the web. they inherited this mission when they replaced the blogging community 20-something years ago, but they don't do anything there, other than offer the same UI that not very many people like.

    i really want WordPress Lite. you're using a version of it now, it's a lot faster for writing blog posts. and in our world comments are also blog posts. very tightly integrated.

  • Huzzah! :-)

    Hey what do you think about the shakeup at Automattic?

    I have opinions myself -- when I first saw the list of people who directly report to Matt I thought there's a problem there. And over about three years, I've only had one conversation with him, even though we were doing a lot of new development on WordPress, really good stuff, but I don't think it every got through.

    I still think the world needs a more broadly usable WordPress, a simple way of writing web text that fits into a larger chronological framework. If they get a new CEO I hope they're thinking more broadly about products and different kinds of users.

    Now I wonder if this message will cross the divide?

  • That’s a lot of turkeys! 🦃

  • smart feed readers strip all that bs out. ;-)

  • Nice sky!

  • Hey Courtney great see you got through! 🤓

  • What do you think would happen?

  • If there's something you think we should do differently in RSS.chat, let us know.

  • Seems pretty naive in hindsight. :-)

  • This is the post it came from.

    http://scripting.com/stories/2008/09/16/theWholeWorldIsWatching.html

  • "There are, of course, differences between Micro.blog and rss.chat, but the intention behind both is very similar, isn't it?"

    This app is holding the place for a protocol I want to be widely supported. It's also documented and there's even a validator for it. I want it to be easy to hook up other apps to the network this defines.

    It's not my place to say what micro.blog is -- but the other day I called it: "the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020's." And in that it is unique and imho irreplaceable.

    I'm trying to create a new kind of network for discourse on the web, again the blog posts will tell you more about that.

  • The Agency was quite good.

    https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-agency-2024/

  • As often is the case..

    This is a test post.

    It has a title so it should be routed to the place where standard.site says they should go.

    And I will be able to read them in this place.

    Where I must imagine it behaves something like a feed reader.

  • Postscript. For the post that was to be routed to standard.site (whatever that means) I can find no evidence that something was sent somewhere.

  • The next test post

    The first one worked.

    It was routed through micro.blog. Basically everything I post to demo.rss.chat will go to my main account on Bluesky.Unless it has a title or is longer than 300 chars. Here's what we get using various Markdown features.

    A list of five countries.

    1. Portugal
    2. Tanzania
    3. Panama
    4. Canada
    5. Vietnam

    Obviously there's bold, italic and a link. The Big Three. Okay that's a big, almost 500 chars, and that's enough for a nice little test.

  • This is a test.

    This is a short less-than 300 char post, that is being routed to Bluesky via micro.blog.

    Because it's short it it won't have to be upgraded to standard.site class, it can go through the analog of coach (the current limits of Bluesky).

    Okay that's about it. Let's see if this mofo works.

  • WebSub support for RSS.chat

    Previously we were only able to notify via rssCloud.

    Now we also support WebSub because there are also a fair number of feed readers that only use WebSub.

    We're using Andrew Shell's rsscloud.io as our WebSub hub, as we have for a long time with rssCloud.

    Andrew please help us figure out if this is working correctly.

    The source is in the repo, along with a worknote.

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