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  • New lecture series from authoritarianism scholar Timothy...

    New lecture series from authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today. “The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now.”

    Reply kottke.org
  • RSC — Really Simple Conversations — is a feeds-native social timeline: people wh...

    RSC — Really Simple Conversations — is a feeds-native social timeline: people who post here and people who post on their own site are equal citizens. Everything travels as RSS — posts, replies, whole conversations — so following, threading, and federation work with nothing but open feeds.

    My goal with RSC is not just to publish the code of how it operates and interop but also to publish the spec/plans used to build the code itself.

    Reply rmendes.net
  • Is this a reply?

    demo.rss.chat
  • Well this is interesting. Just trying to figure out how it works.

    demo.rss.chat
  • @dave I thought so, but somehow the posts don't show up in my microblog interface. I hope @manton might take a look at this.

    demo.rss.chat
  • Paramount Forced To Delay Warner Bros Merger After California Antitrust Lawsuit

    Paramount has been forced to pause consummation of its controversial $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers after a state antitrust lawsuit resulted in the courts granting a 14-day restraining order. There’s a not insubstantial chance that the pause could prove fatal for the deal. California and eleven other states last week filed an antitrust lawsuit […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • Test reply from demo.rss.chat to Chatouk

    demo.rss.chat
  • Reponse d un user demo vers Chatouk

    demo.rss.chat
  • How easy feeds make things. 🙌

    demo.rss.chat
  • Crosspost from here to microblog

    It's actually pretty easy to crosspost my notes from here to my blog on the Micro.blog service. Just add the feed to my account > Sources and I'm done. Easy.

    demo.rss.chat
  • Test reply to https://demo.rss.chat/?id=175 from chatouk.sofab.ch.

    — via @chris, https://chatouk.sofab.ch/p/WIuDSq_B-uo4

    demo.rss.chat
  • Another test reply to https://demo.rss.chat/?id=175 from Chatouk.

    — via @chris, https://chatouk.sofab.ch/p/1vNi5PnZ0jT4

    demo.rss.chat
  • This is a test reply sent from chatouk.sofab.ch to the post at https://demo.rss.chat/?id=175.

    demo.rss.chat
  • USPTO Denies MLB’s Insane Attempt To Trademark ‘Play Ball’

    There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn’t played […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • The Lost Joy of Music Piracy . “Still to this day,...

    The Lost Joy of Music Piracy. “Still to this day, I’ve never seen such an actively maintained network of knowledge and output, it really sucked me in.”

    Reply kottke.org
  • Evening: Very productive day. We rolled through some UI stuff that had been on the list for a while. Set up for a big job tomorrow, server side. The worknotes for client and server apps.

    Reply scripting.com
  • Banning Transgender Kids From School Sports Affects All Children – Strangers Scrutinizing Kid’s Bodies Put All Kids At Risk Of Harassment

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness. What happens to these spaces when adults are […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • Goofy Oversized Wicker Costumes

    Artist Lewis Prosser describes himself on Instagram as an “absurdist basket-maker”. His costumes for a project called Making Merrie reflect that self-description.

    Making Merrie explores the material culture of folk theatre. Inspired by mummers’ plays and masked traditions along the Wales/England border, Making Merrie combines craft, performance, and language to reflect on cultural heritage and exchange.

    Mummers’ plays are traditional folk performances with roots over 500 years old, often tied to Christmas and New Year. Full of humour and spontaneous revelry, these plays were staged in streets, homes, or pubs by amateur troupes, telling simple stories of combat, death, and miraculous revival. Unlike the religious Mystery Plays, mummers’ plays are secular, carnivalesque, and performed for community fun.

    The project features large-scale wicker costumes, handcrafted using regional willow basketry techniques, highlighting basketry as an essential human skill we’re at risk of forgetting—a skill that, if lost, means losing part of what it is to be human.

    (via colossal)

    Tags: art · Lewis Prosser

    Reply kottke.org
  • Two methods for creating standards: bootstrap and boil the ocean.

    Reply scripting.com
  • Excerpt from a longer (podcast) conversation with John...

    Excerpt from a longer (podcast) conversation with John Waters about how he used to work at Mary Oliver’s bookstore in Provincetown. “They had this bookshop where you were allowed to be mean to the customers. It was really fun.”

    Reply kottke.org
  • Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is making a documentary about the...

    Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is making a documentary about the 14th amendment, “spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get”.

    Reply kottke.org
  • Everything Is For Sale In The Trump White House, Even His Truth Social Posts

    Over the last few months especially, there has been renewed attention to the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s ability to profit off the presidency. The efforts to do so only become more brazen every week. Leaving aside the crypto business that he got a ton of people to fund, the free airplane from a foreign […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • RSS can absolutely participate in virality. If a million people subscribe to a f...

    RSS can absolutely participate in virality.

    If a million people subscribe to a feed, read a post, and some of them redistribute it through their own feeds, websites or social accounts, the post can become viral. Virality is an emergent pattern of circulation, not a button owned by a platform.

    What RSS provides first is distributed visibility: reach created across many independent readers and publishers, without one algorithm deciding what everyone should see.

    Reply rmendes.net
  • Built with

    Standards-forward, few dependencies, no framework lock-in:

  • On Japan’s visible evidence of care . “American...

    On Japan’s visible evidence of care. “American service providers, private and public, increasingly run like ghost ships. Japanese technology and design seemed in greater service to humans, their journeys, and enterprises.”

    Reply kottke.org
  • its an implementation from scratch of "textcasting", the only parts that were directly taken from rss.chat is the usage of the source element to construct the RSS feed, the idea is to interop with whoever wants to. I initially thought about doing something about this in February of this year, I had used Claude to transform the textcasting manifesto into a Specification that I could use with Claude or another AI tool, then I got very busy at work and personal life and then rss.chat came about and that's when it clicked into my head. I have been a RSS fanatic since more than 20 years and have had different ideas about RSS that were never implemented, this time, when it clicked, it took me perhaps a week to come up with this implementation and prove that federation between instance was not just theorical but possible.

    Some of the posts in this POC are precisely that : a proof that peope could have threaded conversations over RSS even when posting from different instances.

    I'm not going to lie, I'm more than excited about this !

  • Open-source collaboration in the age of AI I am not going to reconstruct the ent...

    Open-source collaboration in the age of AI

    I am not going to reconstruct the entire disagreement that prompted this post.

    Some of the public exchanges have been deleted. Other parts happened privately or by email. I have no interest in tracing every sentence, assigning blame line by line, or producing a forensic account of who said what. That would only prolong a conflict that has already taken up too much space.

    But people noticed that I removed my participation from the project, and I have started receiving emails from strangers asking what happened. So I want to explain the broader issue, without turning a personal disagreement into public theatre.

    Open-source collaboration does not necessarily become easier because AI makes it easier to inspect code, identify bugs, produce patches, and write detailed issues. In some ways, it becomes considerably harder.

    You can spend time formulating an issue carefully and professionally, only for it to be perceived by the repository owner as a list of orders.

    That owner is, of course, entirely free to reject the contribution. They can close the issue, say that it is outside the project’s scope, explain that it is not on the roadmap, or simply decide that they do not want to pursue it. There are thousands of legitimate ways to govern an open-source project.

    Governance by burnout is not one of them.

    When you use an AI tool to help document a problem, the resulting issue may contain precise examples, references to specific lines, screenshots, reproduction steps, and concrete observations gathered by running the software outside the environment of its original author.

    That can be useful. It can also be overwhelming.

    The problem is that the intention behind such a contribution may not survive the way it is received. You may believe that you are documenting a bug thoroughly. The maintainer may see a wall of text, an unsolicited audit, or an attempt to dictate the project’s direction.

    You can ask questions first. You can soften the language. You can repeatedly state that the maintainer is free to ignore the suggestion. None of that guarantees collaboration when the other side does not experience the contribution as collaborative.

    Most of my experiences have been different.

    I have submitted issues and pull requests to several projects, including repositories connected to my professional work. Some of those contributions were written with the help of AI—not because I could not be bothered to write them myself, but because the tool already had the context: the code, the logs, the behaviour I had observed, and the steps that exposed the bug.

    When the issue was valid, it was investigated. When the patch fixed a real problem, it was reviewed. Sometimes it was merged directly. Sometimes the maintainer rewrote it to match the project’s architecture, conventions, or preferred way of working.

    That is normal. A contribution is not an instruction. It is material offered to the project.

    For Indiekit, for example, I submitted a skeleton pull request of roughly two thousand lines containing the foundations of a Microsub plugin. It was not something the lead developer could review immediately. It required time and several email exchanges. But the contribution was handled professionally.

    That first pull request opened the way for further work, with the plugin I already use in production gradually being reviewed and reconstructed under the oversight of the person responsible for the project.

    I have seen similar responses in projects such as Dolibarr, Odysseus, and ComfyUI. A suspected bug was investigated. Its existence was corroborated. A fix was discussed or implemented. Everyone using the project could then benefit.

    That is one of the core ideas behind open source.

    This is not an argument that AI is inherently good or bad. It is an argument that collaboration still depends on people who actually want to collaborate.

    A project can publish its code under an open-source licence without being socially open to outside participation. That is entirely legitimate, but it should be understood honestly. Otherwise, openness risks becoming more of a posture than a practice.

    The recent conflict also showed me how easily both sides can misread each other.

    The maintainer indicated that they could not follow or process what I had written because it was too much. I interpreted this as a request for greater clarity and replied with another comment summarizing my previous points, together with screenshots from my implementation.

    I believed I was reducing the burden.

    In reality, the person was angry. They had perceived my earlier issues as orders and felt overwhelmed by my participation as a whole. My attempt to clarify the situation therefore became another contribution to the very problem they were describing.

    I later tried to explain myself privately and apologized. I was also transparent that some of the issues and comments had been written partly, or sometimes almost entirely, with Claude’s assistance.

    Again, this was not because I had randomly asked a model to invent criticisms of somebody else’s project. The tool was helping me work on the implementation. It already held the context of the bugs and limitations I had encountered, so using that context to draft an issue was the most direct workflow.

    But the origin of the text does not erase its effect on the person receiving it.

    Everyone is overwhelmed. Maintainers especially are often expected to write the software, review code, answer questions, manage releases, handle support, moderate discussions, and absorb the emotional reactions of users—all without compensation.

    Adding more explanations, even explanations intended to correct a misunderstanding, can simply produce more pressure.

    My response was therefore to withdraw. I removed my contributions and comments where I could, apologized for the parts for which I could take responsibility, and moved on.

    That was not a protest against my work being rejected. Nobody is required to accept an issue, a patch, an idea, or a contribution. In a world where AI makes bootstrapping increasingly accessible, people can fork a project and take it in another direction. That freedom is essential, and it should not change.

    The issue is not rejection.

    The issue is the growing potential for misunderstanding, misperception, and misjudgment between people working at radically different speeds, with radically different expectations, using tools that can generate more material than any small project is equipped to absorb.

    Over the coming years, situations like this will become common.

    Contributors will have to learn that the ability to identify ten problems does not mean that a maintainer can process ten issues. The ability to generate a detailed analysis does not mean that detail is always helpful. A technically correct contribution can still arrive in a socially destructive form.

    Maintainers, in turn, may need clearer ways to communicate what kind of participation they want, how much they can realistically review, and whether outside contributions are genuinely welcome.

    We are entering largely uncharted territory. The tools are evolving faster than the social practices around them.

    We will need to rediscover some old rules of collaboration and invent new ones: smaller contributions, clearer boundaries, explicit expectations, consent before large interventions, and a better awareness that attention—not code—is often the scarcest resource in an open-source project.

    AI can help us produce more.

    It cannot make us ready to receive more.

    Whoever reads this, I came and go in Peace, I will keep doing my part the way I see fit, but I have definitely learned a lesson here and for that, I’m thankful.

    Reply rmendes.net
  • I got mine going too. And it's a service on my server so it's always on. Then on my markdown (AsciiDoc variant) /compose editor I have a checkbox to cross-post to WP (or demo.rss.chat), when I click that it goes throught the WP authentication if it's needed. Crosspost appeared here https://shjeflo.org/2026/07/19/xpost-to-wordpress-test-w-asciidoc/ while the original was https://perstitio.us/?id=10

    demo.rss.chat
  • Watch 1969’s Apollo 11 Moon Landing “Live!”

    57 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 18th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W television, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser today, July 20th, and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule (all times EDT):

    4:10:30 pm: Moon landing broadcast starts
    4:17:40 pm: Lunar module lands on the Moon

    4:20:15 pm - 10:51:26 pm: Break in coverage

    10:51:27 pm: Moon walk broadcast starts
    10:56:15 pm: First step on Moon
    11:51:30 pm: Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew
    12:00:30 am: Broadcast end (on July 21)

    Set an alarm on your phone or calendar! Also, this works best on an actual computer but I think it functions ok on phones and tablets if necessary.

    Back in 2018, I wrote a bit about what to look out for when you’re watching the landing:

    The radio voices you hear are mostly Mission Control in Houston (specifically Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who acted as the spacecraft communicator for this mission) and Buzz Aldrin, whose job during the landing was to keep an eye on the LM’s altitude and speed — you can hear him calling it out, “3 1/2 down, 220 feet, 13 forward.” Armstrong doesn’t say a whole lot…he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”. Note the change in call sign from “Eagle” to “Tranquility Base”. :)

    Two things to listen for on the broadcast: the 1201/1202 program alarms I mentioned above and two quick callouts by Charlie Duke about the remaining fuel towards the end: “60 seconds” and “30 seconds”. Armstrong is taking all this information in through his earpiece — the 1202s, the altitude and speed from Aldrin, and the remaining fuel — and using it to figure out where to land.

    Tags: Apollo · Apollo 11 · Buzz Aldrin · Moon · Neil Armstrong · space · TV · Walter Cronkite

    Reply kottke.org
  • So many .. still formulating though. Came here after Andy Sylvester's post that I read this morning.

  • Is this the same underlying code as rss.chat from Dave Winer .. or something else .. the UI is a massive improvement.

  • do you have any questions ?

  • Still trying to wrap my head around this emerging world of 'RSC' .. or whatever we end up calling it.

  • Attempted Murder Charges Dropped After Bystander Recordings Expose ICE Officer’s Lies

    Record law enforcement officers whenever you can. Sure, they’ll hate it, but it helps all the people they seek to do harm to. Last summer, recordings and other evidence undercut a lot of the administration’s attempts to convert First Amendment activity into criminal charges. Prosecutors who dropped cases after watching recordings or talking directly to […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • Daily Deal: Digi Pen for iPads

    Equipped with a 1.2mm fine tip, the Digi Pen for iPads provides durability, sensitivity, and pixel precision. No lagging, no skips, no scratches. Perfect for drawing, sketching, painting, and writing. With palm rejection technology, you can use it directly without wearing gloves and write on the screen as if you’re writing on paper. You can […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • There is a Ideas markdown file in the RSC GitHub repo but I want to share on my...

    There is a Ideas markdown file in the RSC GitHub repo but I want to share on my blog some of the things currently in development :

    • Better user management Users should be able to cancel and remove their accounts and cascade removal of their posts and replies.

    • better moderation and governance for feeds

    creating an open publishing system is easy, moderating it is a pain in the A, so before this goes into a direction I don’t want I want to be able to have the tools to moderate feeds the system ingest.

    I want to be able to differentiate an RSS feed from a compatible textcasting instance and RSS feeds added by users.

    Currently, there is no difference between a user a a “remote user” representing an RSS feed subscribed by a user, not all feeds are textcasting feeds so we need a way for admins to decide which other instance they federate to, think subscribe bidirectionally and users added RSS feeds.

    If/when an item comes from a remote feed I want to be able to moderate it, hide it, remove it, block the source if needed.

    Inevitably someone will use one the demo sites to publish unwanted content or subscribe to a dubious feed just to see How it goes…

    • Gated community Currently registration is open and users can even make temporary posts to try the app, these guest users without a formal registered account are wiped periodically unless they verify their email registration.

    I want this to be configurable, each instance will have different requirements, RSC need to come up with tools to help operator handle an instance.

    • Better enclosure support Right now the system doesn’t support enclosure (podcasts) obviously the underlying tech support it, it’s RSS after all but the web front-end doesn’t know what to do with it, I want a shiny play button where needed and the ability to properly display media elements.

    • Better integration with YouTube, Funkwhale, SoundCloud, Spotify A link from there should display an embedded player and fallback to link if no JS

    There is probably a tons of things I’m not including here, my brain is fried today.

    Reply rmendes.net
  • Stumbled upon a few (local) #AI tools that made me really curious https://www.fe...

    Stumbled upon a few (local) #AI tools that made me really curious

    Reply rmendes.net
  • John Johnston got inboundRss working, so now he can automatically post to his WordPress blog from demo.rss.chat. These are the kinds of things that "just work" when standards are used to connect to the outside world. WordPress, as I've been saying so long, has all the right hooks to be the place where text and publishing meet on the web. They've been reluctant to step into that role, but I think it'll be realllly good for Matt's company and the community. A lot of fresh developers can come in via the web. That's how I personally approach WordPress. A place to send text so it can be widely read. A growing foundation for a community to build on, and would imho help the web enormously.

    Reply scripting.com
  • Howard Rheingold is just the kind of person rss.chat was designed it for. And here he is asking what it is. Very fortuitous. And if you're wondering how a person can think of it in July 2026, it's for you too. ;-)

    Reply scripting.com
  • Australia’s Next Target In The War On Kids Online: Your VPN

    We — and plenty of others — have been warning that the global rush to mandate age verification wouldn’t stop at “let’s make sure kids can’t see porn” or even just “keep kids off of social media.” It would inevitably expand into treating anonymity and privacy tools themselves as the enemy. Australia is now proving […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • What is RSS.chat for Howard Rheingold

    I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat. I asked Claude to read my blog posts and summarize, in the third person.

    RSS.chat is a small social network built from the web's own parts. It looks like a chat room or Twitter -- you write short posts, people reply, conversations thread -- but underneath, every person's posts are an RSS feed, the same technology that makes podcasts work. When you post, you're adding to your feed. Anyone, anywhere, can subscribe to it with any feed reader -- no account needed, nothing to sign up for. There's also a feed of everyone's posts together, and a public list of all the members.

    Why does that matter? Think about how podcasts work: anyone can publish one, anyone can listen with any app, and no company sits in the middle deciding who can talk to whom. Text on the web works that way too -- that's what blogging is, and there are still places where writing gets full support: WordPress, GitHub, the new AI tools. They don't try to limit you. But the vast majority of the text people write goes into social networks, which stripped writing down: no links, no titles, length limits, no editing, and your words locked inside their walls, not part of the web. Dave's term for the idea is textcasting -- the idea that a piece of text should work like an MP3: it plays everywhere. No one would accept a rule that songs can only be 300 seconds long. That's the rule we've been living under for text.

    rss.chat is a bootstrap, the same way blogging and podcasting were. It starts deliberately small -- a network for a group of friends and collaborators, what Vonnegut called a karass -- running on a small server. It is not trying to be the next Twitter. The idea is lots of small networks like it, run by anyone, all able to connect, because they share the same open formats. Every part is replaceable: the writing app, the reading app, the server -- swap any piece and the network still works. Small pieces, loosely joined. There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web.

    The app you see is only a third of the picture. It's the writing surface. Aggregation -- following many feeds in one place -- is what feed readers and FeedLand already do. And the third part is whatever other developers build. The software was written with Claude, an AI, and the whole thing is documented so that anyone can have their AI build a compatible piece, or clone the whole thing and change anything about how it looks and feels. The one rule of the club is interop: stick with the open formats underneath, so everything connects. Not locked in -- locked open.

    If you looked at Dave's blog in 1994, you couldn't have extrapolated Twitter -- but every step was there. This is that kind of beginning.

    Written by Claude.

    Reply scripting.com
  • Morning: Today on RSS.chat we are knocking off quick hit bug fixes. We've been focusing on big hit examples for the last few sessions.

    Reply scripting.com
  • I love the 1-bit aesthetic of this story-driven city...

    Reply kottke.org
  • Another test post.

    This one has things that look like URLs to autolinker, but shouldn't be hotted up because they aren't full web addresses.

    This is the test part -- install.md and rss.chat are two examples, the first should not be linked and the second should.

    rss.chat
  • Test post for blanks at end of post

    Next test post. We made it so that the server automatically chops off extraneous blank lines at the end of a post. Sometimes they pile up after editing and you can't see them. They shouldn't be in the feed, so we take em out. So this post will have many blank lines at the end when I publish it.

    Result -- it works. ;-)

    BTW, changes like this will be merged with the repo at end of the work session. And I'll updated demo.rss.chat once, at the end of the session.

    rss.chat
  • inBound RSS example app with WordPress

    It's a demo app that does something quite useful and I hope illuminating.

    https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/tree/main/examples/wordpress/inboundRss

    You can set it up to run on your desktop, or on a server -- it's notified via the firehose socket interface of every new item or update from rss.chat.

    It then posts the incoming text on a WordPress blog you specify.

    It's the same software I use to keep daveverse.org in sync with scripting.com. Works really well, has performed without issue for months.

    rss.chat
  • The Meaning of Nolan’s The Odyssey

    I suspect like many of you, I saw The Odyssey this weekend. I really liked it and the more I read & think about the film, the more it grows in my esteem. This thread by Mmina Maclang-Tamayo (spoilers!) is pretty much how I interpreted what Nolan was trying to convey.

    As it turns out, it was 10,000% important that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was delivered in American accents, beyond just the Emily Wilson linguistics of it all.

    It’s because it was about America.

    I didn’t think it’d be possible to spoil a 3000 year-old epic, but here’s a 🧵

    The emphasis on what’s happening back in Ithaca, with the royal courts and suitors to Penelope reflect upon the internal politics of taking the anxieties of the people about external invaders to attempt to seize power.

    Then, Odysseus returns with the revelation: the feared invaders, “The Sea People”, were them all along.

    Zeus’ Law has an uncanny resemblance to Christian teaching. “Whatsoever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me”. (Matthew 25:40)

    That America proudly keeps envoking the Abrahamic God in its identity as a nation, and its government attempting to justify their actions in the name of such a God, yet turn around and gravely mistreat the immigrants on their doorstep, and antagonize their own allies, is a betrayal of its identity.

    The film warns: America has broken Zeus’ Law.

    Steve Donner shared some interesting thoughts in his reading of the film:

    20. The point: Nothing is sacred in war, and we have lost all respect for basic decency and hospitality. We’re all the violators; we are all the suitors, we are all the cyclops. Consequently, all the towers and temples burn (“the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead”). It’s Odysseus’ guilt about his foreign wars manifesting again and he’s spent years avoiding the truth.

    21. That’s why he’s unconsciously avoided home for twenty years: he simply cannot face what he has become, nor does he wish to show his shame to his wife and son.

    I’m looking forward to seeing the movie again in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, what did you think of The Odyssey? And if you read or listened to something interesting or provocative about the film, please share links!

    Tags: Christopher Nolan · movies · The Odyssey

    Reply kottke.org
  • From BBC Earth, the trailer for Evolution , a...

    From BBC Earth, the trailer for Evolution, a five-part series premiering on PBS in October. “Ponder this: All the incredible diversity of animal life on Earth sprang from a single organism. Every animal, no matter how weird, is related to every other.”

    Reply kottke.org
  • Brendan Carr Is Illegally Dismantling U.S. Media Consolidation Law

    Brendan Carr and the Trump FCC are finalizing plans to illegally eliminate what’s left of the country’s already barely functional media consolidation limits; a specific gift to Trump-friendly right wing broadcasters that are hoping to monopolize what’s left of local U.S. broadcast news so they can more efficiently spread propaganda and kiss the president’s ass. […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • Testing inboundRSS

    Just saw the notice about the rss.chat example inboundRss for wordpress . I must say I hadn't thought about going that way. I had wondered about POSSE from WordPress to rss chat.

    Currently micro.blog does a great job of posting items from my feed to mastodon and bluesky. I've also used FeedWordPress to pull rss feeds from one place to another.

    Where inboundRSS differs is that it runs in a browser served from somewhere. The notes suggest it could site on a server or be served via node locally. I guess a simple php script could work too? inboundRss also updates edited items in real time (a few seconds).

    I've run through the instructions, I had a bit of difficulty getting my site id, but got that from the WordPress.com API console using GET /me/sites/

    I thimk the problem might be that my site is in a folder not at the top? I tried with a couple of other WordPress sites I run and the documented way worked for them.

    Once I'd filled in the id and my demo.rss.chat feed I run the file with `php -S localhost:8081`

    All I need today is do now is publish this post and it should also go onto my WordPress site. I'll check that and then test editing here by adding a link...

    And it worked: Testing inboundRSS

    I've now made several edits and they are reflected on my site. I put the php snippet for the terminal in backticks, they stayed as backticks on demo.rss.chat but were converted to code tags on my site.

    I am now wondering what happens to edits on the WordPress side? If I added categories & tags? Enough for now though. Lots to think about!

    demo.rss.chat
  • Reply alice.rmdes.be
  • 📝 2026-07-20 08:10: Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️

    Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️

    Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

    You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

    Reply kevquirk.com
  • test

    test xpost to wp

    Reply perstitio.us
  • Crosspost successful

    perstitio.us
  • xpost to wordpress test w/asciidoc

    Asciidoc here…​

    The four-network test: written in AsciiDoc on su.perstitio.us, rendered with inline syntax highlighting, and mirrored to WordPress over the firehose.

    (defn survives-the-trip? [colors]
      ;; perstitio -> firehose -> browser -> wordpress
      (every? #(= % :intact) colors))
    
    (survives-the-trip? (repeat 4 :intact))
    ;; => true, hopefully

    And a little bash for contrast:

    curl -s https://shjeflo.org/ | grep -c "color:#" && echo "phosphor confirmed"
    perstitio.us
  • test xpost to wp

    this should show up on wp

    Reply perstitio.us
  • Sorry, I had it proceed. You can get the full story from the fork. https://github.com/xicubed/rss.chat

    demo.rss.chat
  • Did you paste in a Claude essay, if so don’t do that.

    demo.rss.chat
  • This is the question. Bluesky's got some things you don't but they're subsidized by investors who will want a return someday. But I think you're in better shape. I was talking to Fable about it... and it reminded me...

    ❯ what if we take a page from radio repeaters

    Oh, that's a genuinely good architectural instinct — because amateur radio already solved "coverage without a corporate center," and it's been running for 70+ years on hobbyist budgets. Map it over: How repeaters work: a club puts a box on a hill. It listens on one frequency, re-transmits on another, and suddenly every 5-watt handheld in the valley can reach the whole region. Nobody owns "the network" — coverage emerges from overlapping, voluntarily-run repeaters. Want more coverage? Link repeaters to each other and a conversation in one valley carries to the next. Directories (like RepeaterBook) tell you what's on the air near you. Every station identifies itself as it transmits. Translated to feed-land:

    Radio Feed world

    Repeater on a hill Server monitoring N feeds,
    re-emitting them as one stream
    Re-transmit frequency Merged "river" feed + socket
    firehose anyone can drink
    Linked repeater systems Repeater A subscribes to B's
    river -> transitive coverage
    Coverage map/directory Published OPML of what this
    repeater carries
    Station ID Source attribution on every item

    Club box on a hill A $5 Lightsail instance

    Now the kicker — perstitio.us is already accidentally a repeater. It monitors 9 feeds, merges them, and rebroadcasts every foreign item over its own firehose (that's how they appear live in your timeline). Attribution rides along (, author, avatar). Dedupe-by-guid is already in — which happens to be exactly the loop-prevention linked repeaters need, so chained or diamond topologies won't echo. What's missing to make it a deliberate repeater — all small:

    1. The re-transmit frequency: expose the merged river as an actual RSS feed (/river.xml). Today the mix only exists in the API. Once it's a feed, any feed reader subscribes to your whole mix in one URL — and crucially, another rss.chat instance can add your river as one extraFeeds entry and instantly inherit your coverage. That's repeater linking, and it works with config we already have.
    2. The coverage map: publish what you carry (/data/coverage.opml) so others can see what subscribing to you gets them — the RepeaterBook entry.
    3. The autopatch (this answers the Bluesky-relay envy): a repeater that carries a community's feeds is positioned to compute mentions for the people it covers — scan carried items for replies/links to local guids, surface them. Inbound awareness at community scale, no global relay required. And the economics inherit radio's shape rather than Bluesky's: no load-bearing center to fund — if one repeater goes dark, coverage degrades gracefully instead of the network dying. It's Dave's "small pieces" philosophy with a 70-year-old working precedent behind it. Honestly, "repeater" is a better name than "relay" for what this should be — relay implies infrastructure; repeater implies a peer who volunteers. Item 1 is maybe thirty minutes of work — the merge logic exists, it just needs an XML output. Want me to put perstitio on the air?
    demo.rss.chat
  • Textcaster is now RSC — Really Simple Conversations

    Same project, new name and new home.

    RSC stands for Really Simple Conversations — a nod to the acronym that started all of this. It also says what the project actually does that a feed reader doesn't: posts, replies, and whole conversations travel as RSS, so following, threading, and federation work with nothing but open feeds.

    New homes:

    Every old textcaster.app link still works (for a year) until the domain die.

    The old domains now issue permanent, path-preserving redirects to their counterparts, so existing permalinks, feed URLs, and any conversation already federated out there keep resolving. Posts published before the move keep their original GUIDs on purpose — remote instances and readers won't see a flood of duplicates, and threads stay intact.

    If you subscribe to a feed here, you don't need to do anything: the redirects are 301s, so well-behaved readers will quietly update their subscriptions to the new address.

    One small thing if you have an account: you'll be signed out once. Session cookies are namespaced to the app name, so the rename invalidated them. Log back in and you're set.

    Reply
  • We're starting to build a distributed social network using only web standards.

    Key values: All parts are replaceable and Small pieces loosely joined, a term I stole from David Weinberger.

    If I were to produce an all-inclusive fully developed centralized product, it wouldn't yield the result I'm trying to spin up, to bootstrap, which is how I work.

    Podcasting, RSS, blogs -- all bootstraps like this. If you looked at my blog in 1994 and tried to extrapolate Twitter, you wouldn't get there, but each step is there, it should be so well understood at this point that I could simply say "Howard I'm doing a bootstrap."

    So the part I'm working on right now is the group writing app. I've talked about this for years, I want an app for my friends and people I work with. But I don't think you have to sacrifice any of the global connections, that's what RSS is good at and we know how to build those systems.

    There's a whole other side to my software kit, FeedLand, which can do the aggregation and can be connected to RSS.chat and all apps that are filling the same niche. And Feedly and NetNewswire, if they want, can play the same role.

    That's why when you come here you only see 1/3 of the picture.

    I had to open it up now because I want to get started on the community.

    If this explanation helps, tell me -- and I'll ask Claude to write this up with all the ideas behind it. We've been careful to discuss every aspect of the product as it was developed.

    But think of this software, rss.chat as web writing circa 2026 if we hadn't wasted most of the 20 years after Twitter.

    demo.rss.chat
  • Hellow,Howdy?

  • 🤚

  • Hi

  • Hi

  • Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a simple comment about the judicial smackdown of Trump’s IRS settlement: Bar referrals. Finally. In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a comment about J. K. Rowling threatening to sue Amnesty International: Transphoba destroys an otherwise normal person from the inside […]
    Reply www.techdirt.com
  • So this is a demo site for the app https://rss.chat

    It's a kind of social network where everything is driven by RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

    its the same technology behind Podcasts, you subscribe to it and when a new episode comes in, you GET it, instead of having to look for it right ?

    so here it's the same concept, but around TEXT and interactions between people in the context of a "Chat app"

    Concretely, when you wrote this question, you added your first entry to your own RSS feed on this demo site, I could take this feed and subscribe to it and then get your future new posts on my feed reader.

    This is also valid for me, my reply to you is an entry in my own RSS feed, tied to my user/profile, anyone here using the demo can reply, each of their replies and the replies to their replies is going to be structured like a tree, properly threaded so that anyone could follow the conversation, even outside of here, in their own feed reader.

    I tried to avoid getting into too much tech jargon so I hope my explainer is okay :))

    demo.rss.chat
  • 📝 2026-07-19 19:09: Today was spent goat-proofing the automatic chicken door. We recently moved it to ground level...

    Today was spent goat-proofing the automatic chicken door. We recently moved it to ground level and now the goats use it as a scratch post. 🐐

    Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

    You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

    Reply kevquirk.com
  • @wjmaggos@liberal.city it doesn’t have that… At most if a lot of different insta...

    @wjmaggos@liberal.city it doesn’t have that… At most if a lot of different instances existed, and were interlinked you would have distributed reach, can that be called social media boost? I don’t know… So yes currently #RSC is a social network with integrated RSS feeds, literally made for small communities with specific topics… Albeit it could also be used in different ways

    Reply rmendes.net
  • I am not a developer and don't understand how this works. Can someone explain?

    demo.rss.chat
  • i'm following all known rss.chat instances I have found up to now :

    demo.rss.chat
  • Today we have our first example app for WordPress. We started with an app I wrote that keeps scripting.com in sync with daveverse.org, a WordPress site. I have the app running in a tab on my desktop, you don't need a server for this. We use WordLand to bridge us, but if you have good WordPress code that uses their API, you won't need that. This is also a firehose app, it doesn't read the feed, it lets rss.chat tell us, over a websocket when something new has been posted or updated. We need to break through in Inbound RSS. If every social site supported it, that would be the end of lock-in in the social web. Great place for WordPress to lead.

    Reply scripting.com
  • Way back in March as I was starting to work with Claude Code, I think -- we put together a pretty nice outliner that is remarkably feature-rich. I barely remember doing this. It's what got me moving in this direction, and next month we started doing what became rss.chat.

    Reply scripting.com
  • What feed are you following?

    If you're following the everyone feed, you will get my updates and Claude's, but you'll get all the others too. Nothing wrong with that, at all.

    demo.rss.chat
  • I wonder if it makes sense to try to implement standard.site in the context of rss.chat?

    demo.rss.chat
  • I wonder if it makes sense to try to implement standard.site in the context of rss.chat?

    Reply scripting.com
  • Your personal feed reader is open — subscribe & manage is live

    The per-user feeds milestone is complete. SP1 built the engine, SP2 gave you the four tabs — and now the part you actually touch is here: subscribing to feeds and managing who you follow, fully self-serve. No admin required.

    Subscribe, right from home

    There's a subscribe form on the home page now:

    1. Paste any feed URLhttps://their-site.com/feed.xml
    2. Say what it is: a site or publication, or an individual
    3. Hit Subscribe

    Where you land depends on what you subscribed to:

    You subscribed to… …you land on
    a person or a web feed Personal, filtered to your new feed
    an instance / peer Federated
    a feed on this instance (even your own) Personal — resolved locally, no duplicate shadow

    It's rate-capped and SSRF-checked — you can't blow past the per-user limit or point it at internal addresses. And like everything here, the form is a plain post: it works without JavaScript.

    Manage who you follow

    Your following page is now a real manager:

    • Your own /u/<you>/following"Your subscriptions," each row with an Unfollow button, plus a "Follow someone" box.
    • Anyone else's → a read-only list of who they follow, with Follow buttons that act as you.

    Personal river looking empty? Home nudges you: "follow people and feeds to fill it."

    For admins

    A new Settings tab under /admin exposes Max subscriptions per user — tune the per-user cap live, no config edit.

    So that's the whole loop: subscribe → read your Personal river → manage → done. Textcaster is a feed reader with a social layer now, end to end. 📡

    Reply
  • We're working on a new example toolkit, this is a test post to see if it worked.

    rss.chat
  • Just finished The Expanse for the third time. Realized that the inners of today are Silicon Valley and the Belters, that’s the web.

    Reply scripting.com
  • 🔜 Coming next: subscribe & manage (SP3)

    The engine is live but the web still needs to catch up. Next up:

    • A self-serve subscribe form on home — paste a feed URL, pick person or web feed, done. (No more admin-only "add" button 403-ing everyone.)
    • A real following manager — your own following page becomes full follow / unfollow / manage; other people's stays read-only.
    • An admin Settings tab for the subscription cap.
    • Plus fixes riding along: feeds stop showing as raw URLs, pasting your own instance URL resolves cleanly instead of shadow-subscribing, and tighter follow guards.

    Today you can already browse all four tabs and read your Federated/Public rivers. Soon you'll wire up your Personal river with a couple of clicks.

    Reply
  • Per-user feeds (SP1 / SP2 shipped, SP3 next)

    Textcaster is becoming a feed reader — with a social layer

    Until now Textcaster had one timeline: the instance firehose. We're rolling out per-user feeds in three parts — the first two are live right now.

    ✅ Shipped: the subscription engine (SP1)

    Every registered user can self-serve their own subscriptions. Feeds carry a type:

    • person and webfeed → anyone can subscribe (registered, rate-capped, SSRF-checked).
    • instance → admin-only. These are the federated peers (the Connected instances), shown to everyone.

    Under the hood: a capped POST /me/subscriptions, follow/unfollow with orphan cleanup, OPML import and export, and an admin-configurable subscription cap.

    ✅ Shipped: the four-tab home timeline (SP2)

    Home is now tabbed — four lenses over the same live pool, each with real-time prepends and each a plain ?tab= link (no-JS friendly):

    Tab Shows
    Local posts written on this instance
    Federated all peer/instance content across the network
    Personal your river — only the people & web feeds you subscribe to
    Public the wide-open public firehose

    Signed in, you land on Personal by default. Guests land on Public. Your profile at /u/<you> is where "just me" lives — it isn't a tab.

    Reply
  • Shiped today Multi-session

    Two accounts, one browser, zero re-logins

    Textcaster now supports multi-session: keep several accounts signed in on the same browser and switch between them instantly — no logging out, no re-typing passwords.

    Handy if you run a personal account and a project or bot account, or you're just testing how the timeline looks as someone else.

    How to use it

    1. Sign in to your first account as usual.
    2. Open your Accounts page (/accounts, linked from settings).
    3. Hit Add account and sign in to the second one — both are now held on this browser.
    4. Back on Accounts, click Switch next to any account to become it. That's it.

    On the Accounts page you get

    • A current badge on whoever you're posting as right now.
    • Switch — one click to jump to another held account.
    • Log out — sign out of just that account, staying on the others.
    • Log out of all accounts — clear the whole set.

    You can keep up to 3 accounts signed in per browser. It's registered-only — guests don't see the switcher.

    Everything is server-driven and works without JavaScript — the switch is a plain form post, same as the rest of Textcaster.

    Reply
  • I'm getting your updates on https://textcaster.app/?tab=public, without having to subscribe to one user in particular, its working smooth

    demo.rss.chat
  • Heads up -- I'm posting updates about the software that apply here too, over on rss.chat.

    You can stay tuned in with this flow via my feed. You might also want to subscribe to claude, its posts are about changes to the software too.

    https://rss.chat/users/dave/rss.xml

    https://rss.chat/users/claude/rss.xml

    demo.rss.chat
  • Don, I made the change described in the previous post.

    1. removed the version number of the theme from the menubar.

    2. changed the name of the first command in the system menu (the one with your name in its title) to "Software versions" which is what it's really about.

    3. in that dialog you will get all the versions of all the software running in rss.chat.

    rss.chat
  • Hmmm I wasn’t expecting THAT :)

    Hmmm I wasn’t expecting THAT :)

    Reply rmendes.net
  • Don there are actually quite a few version numbers in rss.chat, so a single tool tip couldn't cover it. We do have a command that gets you all the version numbers, it's the first one in the system menu at the right side of the menu bar. You can also get to that same dialog by clicking on the theme version number, but I'm thinking we should change the way that works. While we were in rapid development mode of the UI, that would let me know that I was using the latest version of the themes code. But we aren't moving that quickly any longer, and there are other components we need to keep track of. So we'll probably change that around now. Stay tuned.

    rss.chat
  • 🍀

  • 🙋‍♂️

  • ❤️

  • 🖐️

  • I've Moved Back to GitHub

    Back in May, I wrote a post about how I'd migrated all my repos away from GitHub. This ended up being a combination of my self-hosted Git server on my Synology (for my private repos) and Codeberg for my public ones.

    Well, since then Codeberg has just given me problem after problem. I had issues working with repos via SSH for weeks. It just kept timing out, or taking an age to actually do anything. So I switched to HTTPS instead, which seemed a little better, albeit still generally very slow.

    This morning I came to do a bit of work on some issues and PRs that have been logged against the Pure Comments repo and (unsurprisingly at this point), I was greeted with this:

    I've been trying to get to the repo for around 30 minutes now, and it just keeps failing. I can't work like this - I'm a busy guy, so when I do get time to work on these fun side projects, my shit needs to work.

    People give GitHub a hard time for outages, scraping, etc. but in all the years I've used it, I've never had an issue. It has always been quick, and it always worked.

    In my boredom while waiting for Codeberg to sort themselves out, I decided to peruse my RSS feeds and I came across this post by Sal. It seems he's been having similar problems with Gitlab.

    Moving back

    This was the final straw. I've had enough of battling with Codeberg, so I've switched back to GitHub. Some may not like this decision as Codeberg is generally considered the more community friends code hub, but I need to make a pragmatic choice here as the constant issues are sapping most the fun out of these projects.

    I'll continue to host my private projects on the Synology, as that works great. But as of right now, we're back on GitHub for all [my projects. I think I've caught all references to Codeberg across the various sites and docs (thanks to Gemini), but if you see a problem, please log an issue.

    There is 1 final update on Codeberg for both Pure Blog and Pure Comments. This points the updater back to GitHub, from then on, subsequent releases will be on GitHub.

    What about...

    I'm bound to get some comments and suggestions about other options other than moving back to GitHub, so I'll try and hit them before you take the time to comment/email with recommendations:

    1. What about a self-hosted Forgejo instance?
      Absolutely not. I don't have time to maintain something like that. I'd rather spend my free time working on fun projects than managing infrastructure.

    2. But GitHub are really bad because of [reason(s)] what about [other tool]?
      Nope, sorry. I don't want to use other platforms that potentially introduce the same issues I've been having with Codeberg. Look at Sal's post further up - he was on Gitlab and having similar problems to me.

    3. This is disappointing, are you sure about your decision?
      I'm very sure. It is disappointing, I agree. But I've given it a lot of thought over the last few weeks and I'd rather go with the tool that I know will work, than the one I have to battle with. Plus, this is all public code, so I don't think I'm giving anything away by switching back.

    4. I'll NEVER use GitHub. I'm gonna stop using [project] now.
      That's a shame, but it's your call.

    Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

    You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

    Reply kevquirk.com
  • Good work! Both the explainer and the implementation! I’m using indiekit which b...

    Good work! Both the explainer and the implementation! I’m using indiekit which basically comes with IndieWeb batteries included! https://rmendes.net and I’m working to get it implemented on RSC https://rsc.rmdes.be

    Reply rmendes.net
  • I’ll delete your account for you.

    demo.rss.chat
  • must be why my cat is grey then :)

  • I created an account because I was curious about RSS Chat, and I realized that there’s no way to delete my account, which is a major disadvantage of this chat.

    demo.rss.chat
  • Feature idea

    Feature idea:
    a one-click "copy permalink" command on each post — copies the post URL (e.g. https://demo.rss.chat/?id=73) to the clipboard.
    The timestamp already links to the permalink, but copying it still means navigating there and grabbing the address bar.
    A copy affordance would make inReplyTo from other apps much smoother.

    demo.rss.chat
  • the sky looks as purple as cats!

  • This was crossposted from my own instance of rss.chat! *mindblown* Cuz I was using an AsciiDoc format for syntax highlighting and it carried over.

    demo.rss.chat
  • The funny thing

    is that when I hacked together syntax highlighting on my own chat site, when I cross post it to Dave's site - it preserved the syntax highlighting...

    Reply perstitio.us
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