Dave Winer publisher

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.

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. ;-)

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.

I just realized that my perspective is fundamentally different from most people, even people who want the web to connect with itself everywhere. This was what made the improvement of the web happen so fast in the beginning and then sputter to a stop.

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?

and today they actually work pretty well, thanks to work that automattic did.

someone has to go first. this is the kind of thing that could change things in a big way by just 100 or 200 people.

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.

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. And all the source code is released under the MIT license.

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.

The Agency was quite good.

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

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 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.

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.

Just made a small change in the way we prepare feeds, and I have to post something to cause the feeds to rebuild.

Hi Robert, I had Claude tell me that you're the generous developer who wrote us that thoughtful report last night about the security issue.

FIrst, there are no plans for the /localnewuser function, we put it in because we watched some users struggle through installing the server because they had to set up the email server connection before they could log onto the site themselves. We could also see it as a way for a sysop to set up accounts for users. No plans to do anything more with it.

We tried out a bunch of ideas here to integrate news with what rss.chat does, the best one imho was a blogroll, like the one you see on scripting.com, in the left column. That's the way I'd go. But if posts from Bluesky show in the timeline then the discussions are going to be like discussions on Bluesky. And we already have Bluesky for that. :-)

What I really want is an RSS-to-Standard.site bridge, both ways. That will give an outlet to leaflet to the whole web, not just the ones who study AT Proto.

And again thanks for the report. It was basically perfect. ;-)

A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the new version asap.

You're absolutely right. With WordPress you can go from rss.chat to mastodon.

A validator and a way to add menus to the RSS.chat menubar, if you're running your own instance.

Links on today's Scripting home page.

I like this site, I want to keep it open, and as long as moderation is a rare thing, ie people behave like adults and professionals, we'll be fine. But if the moderation gets to be too much, it'll become read only.

This looks spammy.

1. That's a new account, and a new feed.

2. We were planning ahead, leaving space for an enclosure. We don't have a UI for that yet.

3. Yes, use OPML, create a list of servers. That's what software that wants to work with federations will require as input.

Did this show up on the other side?

great to see you here matthias. wow.

sent an email. definitely want to chat.

it would be interesting to hook up the output of rss.chat to the input of Jekyll using templates or themes or whatever they call them in the Jekyll.

I’ll have Claude look into this tomorrow. It will explain to me what’s going on and we may change something.

Did it work as you expected it would?

As you put it "html fragments" not full html pages.

It's just a question of whether you prefer writing in the wizzy editor (the default) or the markdown editor. Since you're coming at it from a script, not sure exactly how it would work. I'm away from home right now and can't look it up. There are docs for the calls now, you could check that out.

New docs for the API that connects RSS.chat to the server.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/blob/main/client/docs/apijs.md

We’ll look into it, first thing I’d do is ask Claude what’s up. You could do that too. My theory is that it’s up to the system you copied it from to have a pref that protects this info.

Welcome Nakedjen. We've been waiting for you.

invite them to come here and join the conversation.

i'm sure they'll want to do some part of this.

we're on the web, we should get to know each other and work together. ;-)

At least we've started building a new nest on the web outside the silos.

Just make sure they are challenged when they say their silo is the web. ;-)

Is there public info about your feed reader, Elixir? I tried doing a search and think I saw mention of it, or it could have been something else.

When you click on New Post it starts a new post.

There is a command that does what you want, in the Menu at the top of the page, Focus on Editor. Probably not a great name, and not something people will know to look for, but now you know to look for it when you accidentally or intentionally click outside the edit box.

Saved does work, if you reload the page while editing, the text will still be there.

Worknotes, updates on new features and fixes in RSS.chat, are now a feed.

https://news.rss.chat/worknotes/rss.xml

we will get around to that, i promise. ;-)

The only other place at this time is the rss.chat repo.

i totally miss that place. dan dan noodles. we were blessed.

Btw you can make official html links without pasting full urls.

Put the url on the clipboard, select some text like this, paste the link. It’ll figure it out.

I call this cute paste, copied from slack and others.

You can also use the link icon above the text box.

Amyloooo so nice to see you here! :-)

In 2005 we did a duet of the Green Acres theme song, and I put it out through my podcast network, and it appeared in a piece I wrote entitled Musical podcasts of 2005, twelve years after the fact.